Windows 7: New Computer - Slow - What could be wrong?

Greetings,

I recently just built my first rig, specifications can be seen under my profile, and already experiencing strange occurrences. For the components I have, I would have figured that it wouldn't act up like it is. Recently, while downloading a game, all performance seemed to lack, my windows flashed white, and it seemed that explorer crashed and rebooted. Opening up programs often takes a few seconds and the other day when I unrar'ed a file, (25GBs), it ended up taking over an hour to uncompress the ISO. I have my speculations that it may be my hard drive, which HD Tune shows the read to be, Minimum 8.4 MB/s, and maximum 62.2 MB/s. I often get a "fart", to where as programs would spontaneously freeze and resume within a matter of seconds. It's become really annoying, and I'm not sure what exactly is going on :S.

Other notes:
Fresh OS Installation
Retail Windows 7 Ultimate

Thanks,
Fuhaxian

Attachment of HD Tune results:

Looks like it maybe a HDD issue. I see on Newegg that this model is discontinued, and has a lot of complaints about the drives failing on them within 3-4 months.

Could there be anything else to it? I only assume it's the harddrive, but could something else be wrong perhaps?

try defragmenting the drive.

I did the other day. It improved the speeds, but I'm still getting a strange problem.

Defraggler states my drive, for a random read test, at 1.29 MB/s

Check your Sata cables and make sure they are fully connected, sometimes they get loose.

The disk is on its way out, time to replace it.

He just got this HDD not too long ago, if it is still under warranty call it in.

download the drive diagnostic tools from manufacturer website, and run them.

Frankly though if HD tuner shows not one but three yellow fields... i'd assume its dying and replace it.