PC slower after installing new heat sink

Do you have anymore info about the motherboard, CPU, ram, power supply, hard drives and the heatsinks? This computer worked before right?

The CPU might be throttling due to a bad connection with the heatsink leading to high temps. You might want to check out your CPU and MB temps (speccy is a good program I like to use)

The sparks might have been related to a short out burnout anywhere in the system. This was most likey caused by the wire and the PSU. It could have damaged anyone of the components in the system. I have had damaged RAM, ram slots, burnt motherboards. Your ram could have been damaged, the interconnects damaged, sata potentially damaged and HDD as well causing slowdown. Not sure if CPU can be effected.

In the future avoid messing with the computer with power on or connected to the wall. You should unplug everything and cycle (press the power button) before messing with the insides.

I am only an amateur at this so I hope some more experienced members will drop by to provide better feedback  

Welcome to Tom's Hardware Forums,
I'm going to venture here that a driver was corrupted and is now 'orphaned' using up resources to find it's hardware which it can't locate because it doesn't remember what it was... terrible cycle. You can check to see if that is what is going on by loading your resource monitor widget - if your CPU is constantly spiking, that's a fairly good indication of an 'orphaned driver'. You can use a driver sweeper program to clean up any loose drivers running around. Do you remember any particular (you can also find this out in your update history) driver that was updated/reinstalled afterwards?
Hope it helps, let me know if I'm off track here (it seems to fit)
Hope it helps

How about in the future dont buy a pc from someone who shoves bare wires into the PSU. Lol

The fact stickman regularly fries components and sees nothing wrong with that kinda makes me wonder too.(no offense just saying)

define slower? How do you know? Did you time it? Why were you screwing with the heatsink? Did you overclock? Was it overclocked when the crazy guy sold it too you? Did the bios reset?

^+ a gazillion - very sound advice

HAHAHA LOL No offense taken
I haven't fried anything myself personally, just seen these situations happen to friends who haven't been good to their stuff, done stupid things with their comps or had bad quality PSU fry stuff and then come to me to either fix or rebuild =P

CPU usage is moving from 5% all the way up to 30%. I reinstalled windows a few weeks ago and did not do a single update. my pc was operating normally.

I didnt know at the time. And it was a great deal. I just upgraded from a stock fan. I have never overclocked. I havent tried resetting bios.

Okay, seems I missed the mark here then which has me wondering... did the computer get past POST when you touched the wire into the power wire, causing the shutdown - did you hear a single beep before that happened?

perhaps the system was overclocked by him and now it no longer is. As mentioned already, use a monitoring program to monitor your temps and cpu speeds. Run prime95 to stress you cpu to see max temp and speed.

It has never beeped before.

I think popatim is more likely right with prior overclock, now stock clocks - see what CPU-Z tells you

ok im going to reinstall windows and see if I still have problems. then I will overclock

Do some stress testing with prime95 and check your temps at stock before you OC

I like this idea about an orphaned driver. Sounds like a realistic possibility.

reinstalling windows fixed the problem. PC is back to normal. Dont know what happened.