Radeon 5970 prevents the computer from booting from the first time

What purpose will the Zero Fill serve ? I am not sure I understand and I am really not willing to do it as I don't have a second drive to make a full backup.

I have a second partition with another fresh installation and yes, the result is the same when I run the test from there, as well.

I replaced the drive. All is well now.

Oh but try to see if you can save the HDD, since now you have a new HDD, you could try to wipe all data inside the old HDD and see if the problem still persist!

Actually, the old HDD is now gone. They offered me a 1.5 TB brand new Seagate Barracuda, and I had to only pay the difference. They said they will take care of the old drive and RMA it in the meantime, so I won't have to wait for over a week for a replacement to arrive.

Oh, glad to hear you RMA'd the HDD, let us know the final result

This is as final as it gets. According to them, they will be able to exchange it for a new drive and I get to keep the upgraded one and the old one is none of my concern anymore.

Right now, the computer works perfectly, the new drive passes all tests and I can finally go to sleep without fear.

One last question - how do I change the name of my Windows installation in the boot manager ? Since they used Norton Ghost to copy all my data to the new drive, repairs were necessary to the boot manager and now my Windows installation appears as "Windows 7 Ultimate (Recovered)". I want to rename it to "Windows 7".

Here's an Answer for that question on the forums

http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/5042-recovered.html

Follow those steps, although i wouldn't worry about that too much

Awesome, thanks a lot. It worked.

Glad to hear it worked, Dellius, this thread is ready to be closed

I am so sorry to disagree, but now system-wide lag occurs. Started happening maybe a couple of hours ago.

I am not sure what the cause is.

My CPU usage periodically spikes to 90% or so. Here are screenshots.

Here is a little more information, which may be related.

1. My information was transferred from the old disk to the new one with Norton Ghost. I am not sure if this is in any way related.

2. I am downloading a file at about 2 MegaBytes per second with uTorrent.

3. CPU temps are high, screenshot attached.

4. Explorer just crashed.

Also, congratulations on your new rank.

Edit - file downlad completed, system lag is kind of lower, but it has never happened before. I used to download files at almost 10 MB/s with minimal lag.

Sorry to ask silly questions, but last time I asked too late and my video card barely survived, and my HDD wasn't THAT lucky, not to mention it cost me a month and a half of headaches and inability to work and I deal with SEO, so it's important that my PC is healthy and working at all times.

I will try a defragmentation and post the results.

Edit 2 - Here is what Disk Defragmenter says. Only 3% fragmentation of my main partition, the one I am downloading to.

Edit 3 - I am running Disk Defragmenter as I am writing this and the system behaves very well, no lag, no nothing.

Thanks ok, let's see.. your temps seems a little bit too high, but those screenshots cant speak for themselves... could you upload Resource Monitor screenshots?

And where are you getting those temps at? which program? i'd suggest using CPU-Z and GPU-Z or Speccy!

CPU: -23ºC? something is NOT right there hehe...

Do those things and report back, please!

Sorry, the computer was lagging so when I tried to capture the whole window to make a screenshot, it captured only a small part, instead. I got it from SpeedFan.

Here are other screenshots from Resource Monitor. I took them later, though, when the problem seemed to have gone.