My windows machine is slowing down

[DocClock aka MadClocker]

I do not know what is going on, but today, I fired up my old computer; and Ghost Recon Advanced warfighter is unplayable
It is not that hard on resources so why the slowdown? I decided maybe it was the game, so I fire up HL2 and notice it being just a bit jerky as well.

It seems that after M$ announced that WINXP is dead, my XP machine is starting to die a horrible death. Could just be coincedence but the timing sure stinks.

When I clicked on "My Computer" I had a blank window with the flashlight looking around trying to find something... and it took several seconds to see the contents of the folder. Something is amiss here. now I'm going to have to do hdd diagnostics and other memtests and such. Ugh what a pain.

Maybe it's time for a good cleaning, and see what's going on inside.
Could be that the video card's fan is stuck..will have to check it

System is
Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3 (p35 chipset soc 775)
Core2 Quad Q6600 (slacr)
4x1gb ddr2
Pata hdd (yep, old tech) 152gb? it may be dying
Mitsumi dual layer dvdrw

All I want is to just be able to play my games. Looks like it's time to nuke the drive and start over


EDIT: MY BAD...I forgot to pause [email protected] was looking at GPU-Z and it was showing 99%gpu load and I'm looknig at my desktop with nothing else running and I'm thinking what could be running when I have nothing going? That is when I remembered F@H. I paused it and gpu-z shows 0% load. I feel so dumb

 

[ATMINSIDE]

Hehe been there done that, glad it was a simple fix!

 

[Daleon]

Nice find. I would have definitely figured that HDD as your biggest bottleneck. You don't list the video card. If you really want to breathe a little life into it though I would find a good used cheap SSD and throw it in there.