Unusual performance issues

[ubernova]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to the forums and come seeking some help in figuring out what's wrong with my PC. So like the title says, its having performance issues. I built this tower a few years back and have upgraded a few parts since then but only over the past half-year or so has it given me trouble. Before I go any farther I'll give you my specs:

CPU - AMD Phenom II X4 955
Graphics - ATI Radeon HD 6850 GDDR5 1gb
HDD - Seagate 500gb
RAM - Crucial Ballistix 4gb x2 (8gb)
Motherboard - ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO
PSU - 750w something or another lol
OS - Windows 7 64-bit

(That's to the best of my knowledge, if anything more is needed I'll gladly try to help )

Now onto the problems at hand. I noticed a while back that it was starting to run slower, both for gaming and performing simple tasks. I'd play games that I never had problems with before or shouldn't now (Fallout New Vegas, Fable 3, Dungeons of Dredmor, GTA IV) and now they're running pretty poorly. Even with the graphics settings lowered you can still notice some chugging going on. Beyond gaming, just doing things as simple as trying to start a game on Steam can take ages to get going. I'll notice it when opening programs, sometimes while watching youtube clips, trying to save files, etc. Its really annoying and makes me concerned that some essential piece of hardware could be dying on me..

Here's what I've tried over the past several months:
- I've performed a full Dban on the hard drive and reinstalled Windows and updated my drivers. That helped for a bit of the general slowdown but gaming is still a troublesome issue. - - I've ran Advance System Care 5 Pro and did tune ups, deep cleans, and turbo boosts but that didn't help.
- I upgraded my Ram from 4gb of G-skill (1033mhz I think) to the 8gb Crucial set I have now. Helped some but not much.
- Ran Seatools to verify my HDD condition, no problems found.

I've still got the problems though and I'm running low on ideas, and am too broke to just upgrade everything and hope for the best. Sorry about the long post, I just figured the more info you guys have the easier it'll be to figure this out. So if anyone has any ideas please let me know. Thanks everyone for your time =)

 

[cl-scott]

Honestly, the fact that the issues seem to affect things like opening programs and saving files, it makes me think your HDD is on its way out. I'm not overly familiar with Seatools, so I don't know what kind of tests it will run, but in cases like this you would typically need to do a full surface scan to get an error. That would take about 1.5-2 hours, so typically it's not something you find a lot of testing tools enabling by default.

 

[dish_moose]

I say put a fresh windows install on your HDD - back-up any files first - then wipe the drive.
-Bruce

 

[ubernova]

I've had a HDD go on me before in the past and it showed these symptoms at first, before it full on died anyway. I hope that's all it is 'cause they're cheap compared to most other parts.