Extreme Slowness

@torre Yeah, the M4A78 PLUS is a bit obscure for some reason. Haven't found anything.
@lehnerus I'm not using that drive, the problem is within the OS, that is just my storage drive which I have no issues with.

lehnerus2000 said:

Pirate43 said:

I'm not using that drive, the problem is within the OS, that is just my storage drive which I have no issues with.

Fair enough (if the drive is disconnected).

Are you sure that Windows doesn't try checking that drive, when you are doing something unrelated?
You haven't moved any system files to it (e.g. Hibernation file, Page file, User folder)?

When I have Process Explorer open, I can see that Windows is regularly performing HDD operations (only a few bytes at a time).

Every 60 minutes or so, my floppy drive "clunks" (i.e. performs the checking for disk action) even though I haven't used it for months.

Another thing that happened to me is that I had a dodgy power cable on my DVD drive.
My machine took ages to boot, because it kept trying to check the DVD drive, even though it wasn't required for booting at all!

If you are not "using" the HDD, you could disconnect it and see if that makes any difference.

I will try disconnecting the WD.

Do you have any other drives laying around you can install Windows on and test ? It also sounds like a hard drive to me. At least this will rule it out.

Have you tried the Performance Troubleshooter? Troubleshooting

Unplug any floppy drive and leave it unplugged.

It's hard to see how it can be the OS when you clean reinstalled two different versions. Nevertheless work through these troubleshooting steps which cover most problems with OS and hardware. Make sure to achieve and maintain a clean boot straight away, replace any bloated AV with MSE or Avast 6 and Win7 firewall for best performance.

Test your RAM - Test with Memtest86+ overnight to stress test it.

Burn WD Data Lifeguard ISO to CD, boot and run the Extended HD scan. In addition you could have boot sector corruption which can cause all kinds of problems, so as a last resort wipe the HD with the CD.

Test your CPU - Stress Test with Prime95 - Windows 7 Forums.

If none of these help, study the logs as given in the steps to look for repeat errors and resolve all.

I have done both Prime95 and Memtest86+ before for many many hours and to my frustration, they show everything as normal. I do indeed have W7 on the intel 160GB SSD shown on my specs.

Would the MB SATA problemstill come into effect if I said another symptom was copying a file from one flash drive to another? Because that is also another issue. Less than 1 megabyte per second.

Likely USB controller issues - either hardware or driver could be responsible.

Have you tried the manufacturer's chipset?

If so, and you've only tried the manufacturer's chipset, have you tried running for awhile with the chipset the Win7 installer issues during install, and/or quickly updates after install via optional Windows Updates?