Is something wrong with my PC?

[kristianity77]

Right, ill start with the specs of my pc for all you peopl eout there in the know!!!

Athlon 64 3000 CPU (Socket 939)
MSI motherboard (not sure of model)
512 Ram (DDR400)
120GB Sata Maxtor Drive
Pioneer 111D DVD Writer
On Board crappy graphics
Soundblaster Audigy 7.1 Sound
Win XP Pro (SP2)

Now, i dont know if its just me, but for some reason im feeling that out of this pc that ive had for quite a while, im getting really lame performance. IE if i "aquire" say a 360 game, and it needs Quickparring to correct (i did this today for a game, which only needed a few bytes here and there repairing) is taking my PC around the 25 minute mark to do this.

Then using WinRAR to extract this said game which clocks in at about a 6gig rar file (split into multiple parts) about a further 25 minutes to extract. Am i being picky or is this par for the course. Im sure my old PC which was quite alot slower on paper than this one was alot quicker.

There isnt really any garbage on my hard drive, its quite tidy and such but im not sure what it could be. Anyone have any ideas? Is it time for an upgrade?

 

[cenotaph]

Get more RAM. A SATA2 drive with NCQ wouldn't hurt either.

 

[kristianity77]

so if i doubled my ram then would it cure my problem? Because also, i find that when im extracting something, or reapiring a file, it more or less kills my pc dead until its finished

 

[kellyan95]

Reformat the drive and reinstall windows. if you want to go the hard way: defragment, get new firewall/antivirus, scan, check registry...

 

[FAST6191]

PAR2 files, I do not play this game but it seems most 360 files are fairly large splits. This is why it takes ages. and it applies (albeit to a lesser extent) to RAR files.

I agree with cenotaph although you may need to find a SATA card (maybe even stick a RAID card in there and make a RAID).
Also those old Athlons overclock really well.

 

[Javacat]

Reformat the drive and reinstall windows.

^ Always the best solution. Just make sure you have backed everything up.

More RAM would help as well and it won't cost you much to increase it to 1GB, or even 2GB.