PC (not Windows) is slow, any thing I can do about it?

The PC I'm using isn't new and I've been using it for quite some years, the system is generally slow especially under heavy loads, it doesn't 'lag' or freeze or anything like that, it works normally but everything it does it does slowly, and like I said it gets worse under heavy loads

Just to be clear this is -not- Windows related, Im on a new, clean Win7 install, fully updated and with not alot of running programs, its as clean as could possibly be, so its not that.

My question is what can I do to get bit more out of it, are there tweaks to make Windows lighter? any boosting programs you recommend? Strangely enough I OCed the processor by more than 1Ghz, but that made close to 0 difference. The spec list is up to date.

Hi Mellon,

To be fair under light loads, say opening a webpage, running a light program... etc theres no issue, its pretty quick. Things start to go downhill under serious loads, for example multiple tabs running in firefox which sometimes ends up crashing or some graphics intensive game then it slows down. what I mean by that is there are no freezes/no errors, it just takes a painfully long time to load whatever it was loading/processing, thats the best I can explain it.

Also i will look into an SSD, never considered it before but probably should.

One question though, my drivers are running using IDE, is it worth switching to AHCI, speed-wise?

Have you checked your temps ? That chip runs quite hot by today's standards, and given its age it's possible the paste has gone south - the cpu could be throttling. I used to have a similar processor - an i7 930 that was o/c by 1GHz to 3.8GHz. On the odd occasions it didn't boot and reverted to stock speeds, I could really see the difference 135% clocking makes.

Overclocking - no difference, heavy load problems - could be heat related.