I recently got a nasty piece of malware of some sort that forced me to do a complete re-install. It was actually probably I good thing - my old windows was filled with random junk that should have been cleared out anyways. Long story short, I started from scratch with a fresh re-install and format of all my hard drives.
Strangely enough, I very quickly noticed that the computer was running very slowly. I had never had any speed issues before, even with multiple copies of games running simultaneously, so I was very surprised.
I opened up task manager to check my stats - turns out I was hovering around 12-28% CPU usage and ~3GB RAM (out of the 8 gigs on my machine). Despite this, the computer has been running incredibly slowly since. I've tried all the easy stuff (restarting, defrag...).
Any ideas on what could be going on?
Stats: Alienware Aurora (don't hate :c) Intel i7 - 930 @ 2.80GHz (8CPUs) ~2.8GHz 9216MB RAM Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
EDIT: I ran a disk check on all my drives - no cigar, windows says everything is fine.
Details: If I had to describe the issue, I'd say it's on again - off again lag. During the 5-30 minute periods where the computer is runing slow, I can barely do anything. Often even the most basic things will freeze up, IE, the task manage will stop responding, and when I open the start menu, typing a letter into the search causes the whole bar to freeze up. Often I am unable to even get a response from ctrl-alt-del. Sometimes it's not quite that crippling, but even still it's bad - I noticed I once opened a folder and it took a very long time to open (sounds like hd issues...). Again, the strange part is that I can use the computer for up to 50 mins without issues, then I have to wait 20 mins or so before it's usable again.