[simulacrum]

ok, though my system is a little over a year old, it still should be running a lot faster than it is. i built it to be able to run crysis(it used to, very very well), and it should be able to since it exceeds the recommended system requirements. crysis isn't one of my favorite games, so thats not what im frustrated with, i just wanted to give a perspective on what my rig ought to be doing. even older games like battlefield 2 and company of heroes(especially) take forever to load up. not only this, but system startup takes a lot longer than it should (despite having only about 6 very light programs on the startup list). i've tried updating drivers, managing windows services, i do routine defrag weekly.

vista ultimate 64
amd 64 athlonx2 6000+
4gb ddr2
ati radeon 2900XT HD 1gb
maxtor SATA something or another 7200rpm 3Gb/s


mcafee comes up clean, as well as spybot.
the programs on boot are mcafee, realtek audio, spybot, windows (not internet) explorer,

i'm not using aero or any special themes, effects are all off. ccleaner didnt seem to do much. windows services that do nothing for me were already disabled

thanks

[Fordy]

It was originally estimated that Vista would need reformatting and installing at least once a year,

and I must admit after around a year my old Vista PC started slowing right up, I only reinstalled when I passed i onto my mum, it's a lot faster now than it was for sure.

So you could bear that in mind if all else fails.

However my main concern is that you don't mention a brand of RAM? If that's because it's generic, it may well be the problem, built cheaply and not built to last.

2GB DDR2 sticks are so cheap now, that might be worth it.