New system question

[DangerMaus]

I recently bought and put together a new system and it seems a bit laggy for what it should be. Just doing normal tasks in OS seem to take longer than I would think and some apps, such as Outlook 2007, run slower than I would like.
My system is:
ASUS P5B-E motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 2.67 Ghz 4MB 1066Mhz
4GB 800Mhz RAM
Geforce 8800GTS 640MB PCX video card
2x 500GB WD harddrives (non-RAID)
Windows XP 64-bit

Any suggestions on what I should check?
-dm

 

[cyberjock]

Well, the list looks nice, but why Windows XP 64-bit? From what i've read about how the WoW technology works, if you run a 32-bit program in 64-bit you are using twice the amount of memory for the program(the most significant 32 bits are all 0's) but you also take a slight performance hit. I installed windows xp 64 on a computer and I ran into problems like crazy running 32 bit software. It ran slow, if at all. It was harder than heck to find 64 bit software for the machine. My first comment would be to go to 32 bit, which of course, would kind of negate some of the reason for going to 4GB of ram.

How much slower are we talking? like 50% slower or it takes 2 mins to load outlook? I'm sure since you built this system you have tried defragmenting the hard drive.

The other possibility, which seems much less likely could be your boot drive is going bad. If it's having a hard time reading data, that could be a culprit. You could try running a program like spinrite and just do a surface test and see what comes out of it.

Hope this helps.

 

[aevm]

It could be a hardware problem but often this kind of thing comes from software.

Any processes showing as active in Task Manager?

Are you using some good spyware detector (Spybot, AdAware, etc.)? Anti-virus?

Any Windows services running that you don't really need?

Driver issues? Is this a clean installation of the O/S with the latest drivers?

Western Digital drives used to come with a DataGuard utility (not sure about the name). That helped a lot with the disk speed in my case.