PC being sluggish

Hey, Orphik - check out Freeway's latest post - disabled the "Standard floppy disk controller" and the problems (seemingly similar to yours) went away.  May be worth it for you to explore this a bit...

 

What do you mean - more programs? I wasn't suggesting you go out and buy SoftICE.  If you do, budget enough for a copy for me as well...

 

You could try reinstalling Windows onto one of your other hard drives, and selectively adding components / installing drivers until you run into the problem.  When you hit the problem, it is likely that the last thing you did to the system is related to the cause of the problem.

 

If you don't hit the problem... Does that mean you've fixed it?

 

FWIW, the PC shop would have the benefit of physical access to the system.

 

Have you tried a different graphics / video card (preferably a different brand)?

There is another thread (I've pointed you to it before ) that is rather similar to yours - you may wish to review it, or at least the recent activity there, to see if there is anything else that applies to your situation or would be of use in your specific case.

 

Keep in mind that the results may tell you where the CPU is spending time, but what precise actions to take to do something about it are not always clear.  For example, it is of little use to identify that the CPU is spending 70% of its time in HAL!WRITE_PORT_UCHAR, if you don't know what to do about it.  Unforturnately, that's about the point I am at.  Perhaps profiling, or setting breakpoints with debuggers like SoftICE so that one can examine the stack of the thread when it enters the hot function(s) would shed some more light on what's going on.