Help, my 3.0ghz computer is having trouble with simple shit!!
 

I've got a 3ghz pc with 512 mb ram slowing down during basic desktop work. Like playing an mp3 while downloading files or taking forever to move bigger files from one drive to another. I'm wondering what may be slowing me down? Are there any programs that can show me what is causing this? I'm using windows xp pro all the drives have plenty of room and recently defragmented.

run a benchmark such as sandra see if it points out any problems

install all of your motherboard software etc...

how will this speed up the computer? I think almost everything is installed except raid drivers which I'm not using.

a rogue program that is sucking cpu power perhaps... right click the task bar->task manager... what is taking up all the system resouces? also, have you updated the drivers from the base install or windows update?

Depending on your chipset, the motherboard drivers can have a huge effect on Disk performance. What you were describing, does not sound like its a processor problem as much as it is your ATA disks. if I were you I would install the RAID Drivers, just incase. Also are your hard drives all new or is there one older one in there, Also make sure UDMA is enabled (it is by default but you never know what will happen) also check your Cables, make sure you are using UATA 100-133 cables and not ATA 33-66.

Running sandra (Like charliex said) will show you what is going on. Good luck with it.

At work they upgraded me from a 800 Mhz up to a 2.4 Ghz and I really miss my 800 Mhz cuz this thing is SLOW! I've eliminated all extras at start-up but it still runs like crap. I'm thinking that the motherboard on the new one must be crap.

Disk I/O is an often overlooked problem that can affect performance seriously. There are PIII 500MHz systems that can transfer data between disks many times faster than your P4 3GHz simply because they have a much better disk I/O subsystem.

If your system is spending a lot of time transferring files, it takes CPU time too, although usually not a lot...