1 for the PC know it all's !
 

right , in theory my PC should be fairly quick and is but every so often something slows it down completely for up to a min , sometimes more this can happen just browsing with firefox / running games can often freeze for a second / running "burn in test" takes about 4 mins to start up !!!

its as though the CPU usage is at 100% for a bit but it isnt

main specs are :
4GB ddr3 ram / OC'd to 1600
AMD phenom II quad core (3.2)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1024 MB / ddr5
2 HDD's -
1 x 60 GB SSD drive as operating system drive
1 x 1TB "spinpoint" storage drive
XP SP3 with most of the animations and stuff disabled etc

I'm beginning to think the SSD OS disc might be bottle necking but this is barely more than a (slightly) educated guess

any help would be greatly appreciated

i would put my money on the hardrive as that was my first thought, but again i could be wrong.

that was my thought too , its quick until it has a few things to do at once , nothing major , simply starting 2 pages in firefox and thunderbird email at the same time can slow it down but 1 at a time there is no problem

I have this problem then clocked that it does when avg updates nearly once a day

run an extensive memtest

Unless the SSD HD is faulty then no, quite the opposite in fact, after all thats the whole benefit in SSD in that it has quicker read/write seeks, HOWEVER it can be read/wrote to so many times, so effectivly they do have a lifespan.

What else is running in the background?

Martin

quite a few thing running in the background but nothing that jumps out at me as anything dodgy or power hungry

cant get a tidy list to copy and past (using AIDA32 to make a report but its all over the place !)

have ran a memtest and is fine

another thing i have just noticed is whenever i try to play an audio CD its very choppy , disc is fine and unscratched and its the same in any of the 3 drives i have

mouse sometimes gets very jumpy too