Whats the Problem?

[aniki]

For quite some time now my PC's performance has been very sluggish even after several reformats. Its pretty difficult for me to determine whats causing it. Internet explorer and many apps seem to lag when launched. Menues often dont respond immediatelty or dont even respond at all when clicked on.

I dont know if its my imagination, but it feels like Im running Xp on only 256 megs of ram. I have feeling that this issue is a hardware related. The system ran perfectly before. Could it be the Memory or Hard Drive? Or even the CPU.

My specs
P4 3.0 Ghz
1 Gig of Ram
WD 160 7200 RPM Hard Drive
ATI X850Xt
Audigy 2 NX Sound

 

[eXx08]

Stupid Pentium 4's. But in all honesty check in windows system maneger or RUN: DXDIAG and see for yourself what you are really running.

 

[Fern]

In addition to the above, might check BIOS. Or even run diag proggies to make sure everything is runing as it should.

Try runing the performance wizard in Sissoft Sandra and see what pops up too.

 

[aniki]

I ran Sissoft Sandra and everything appears to be normal. Also I resested the BIOs back to optimal defaults and the computer continues to run very sluggish. Loading times for are ridiculous for anything I run!! It takes forever for windows to start

 

[eXx08]

Mabey it's just the system.

 

[aniki]

Here is my problem. Im living in Japan where computer part prices are insane. I had to order a ATI X850XT AGP from America and have my brother ship it over. Video Performance is great! I think my memory may be bad, so I want to purchase new memory. Memory is running around $200 for a GB. I would hate to spend that much money on an aging system only to later find out that that wasnt the problem. Anyway to test the memory??

Update:Im getting Hard Disk Failures on Windows Startup now.