PC is lagging sometimes

Hey guys i have a major problem with my PC and i don't really know how to fix it, hope you can help me

Two weeks ago my PC started lagging whenever i would run Firefox with more than 5 tabs in it, especially if one of the websites from those tabs contained Flash content. Sometimes it gets laggy by simply starting Facebook or by pointing the cursor at something, an element, an image that changes on mouseover etc. When i play the game Heroes of Newerth or Counter Strike 1.6 my PC laggs whenever i move the cursor. If i don't move the cursor everything works perfect.

I'm thinking it could be the CPU or one of the HDDs because i just bought the GPU.
And for some reason in Device Manager, it displays my SAMSUNG HDD as being ATA, despite the fact that it is SATA. Here's a screenshot

I checked the Task Manager in the Performance tab when these lags occurred and it seems the CPU usage spiked up.

Thanks guys

PC spec:
- Windows 7 32-bit
- Intel Core2 Duo E7300 @ 2.66 Ghz
- 1 SATA SAMSUNG 160 GB and 1 ATA WDC 80 GB HDD
- 2 GB RAM
- GeForce GTS 450 - 512 MB GDDR5

How much free space do you have on each drive? Do you defrag? Unless you have some AddOn you can't live without, try Chromium. I set it to open to an empty page and even if the HD is churning, it snaps open. Rather than have it come up with multiple tabs open I wrote a small program to load a bunch of sites once the browser is up. That helps with loading anyway.

If the drive with the swap file has 50% free space or less you may want to consider increasing that amount. I try to run with about 70% free space on my system drive and use USB docks with internal drives to hold most data. Stuff like video muxing I do across the externals to avoid putting a burden on the system drive.

Well, all my drives are empty... i did a fresh format to both HDDs and there's nothing on the drives that can cause this problem. I haven't disabled automatic defrag from Windows 7 services.

And when i run Heroes of Newerth the ram goes to 1.8 GB usage out of my 2 GB... :|
Screenshot

alexandrw said:

I have solved the problem
It was from an windows update, this one specifically:
Realtek - Network - Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller 239 KB(Release June 2011)

Thanks for your help!

Thanks for posting the solution.