New build is getting slower over time

I finnished building my PC yesterday from scratch, and I installed windows vista premium using an anytime upgrade DVD from my laptop, and all the drivers, then I installed crysis to see how awesome the graphics were, and they were, and so was the rest of the computer. It was lightning fast and took no time at all to boot and games ran at their highest settings at 30+ FPS.

I then connected the PC to the internet to I could download the updates, and ever since then it has got progressivly slower. using the auto update, windows installed 81 updates (totalling around 300mb) and I installed and updated all the drivers for my video card and motherboard.

while I was doing this I installed 5 games totalling around 50 gigs of space taken, and once I finnished with all the updates, the computer was really, really slow. slower than my virus saturated laptop. The frame rates for the games were also very, very poor.

here are the specs

Intel Core2duo 3.0ghz
XFX GTX 260
Galaxy Nforce 740i SLI
WD 7200 RPM 32mb cache 500g HDD
ASUS 24x SATA DVD drive
Corsair 750W
Thermaltake M5
2 2gig OCZ 800 sticks of high performance gaming ram

I want to say the problem is I need to clear out the registry because of all the updates but I don't know.


My second guess at a cause would probably be that I got viruses from surfing the internet and downloading things without internet security.

Im pretty sure overheating isn't a problem because everything was running at around 30 celcius


what should I do?

I need to defrag even after just installing everything?

I would defrag. It's worth a shot. Also, your hard drive may be dieing. Sometimes they get slower before they die. Listen for any scratching noises from the hard drive that seem abnormal. This may be painful, but reverting to old drivers for your gpu and motherboard may solve the problem. Do that as a last resort. If reverting fails, it could brick your system. Windows may have corrupted itself. A clean install may be the best idea. Just back up everything. Of course, it could be a virus. Downloading Avira free antivirus and doing a scan could save you a lot of effort and at least rule out one possibility. Good luck!