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As far as age goes, if it's a desktop it should still be running fine. I bought a desktop (a Dell) back in 2006 that worked fine for five years up until I gave it away to my brother who ended up selling it. It required some maintenance from time to time, but it never just up and died or became nearly useless though.

My laptop though (an HP), that was pretty high end when I got it back in 2008, is really starting to go after roughly 4 years of (heavy) use.

Ketara wrote:An interesting tidbit which again, makes me think this is no hardware problem.

A whiles back, I set up a separate administrator account on my computer (because I disliked the idea of not having access to the full control of my own PC). Now having logged in through that account as opposed to my usual one, the internet, and the computer in general is working almost as fast as the older account used to be. Thoughts gentlemen?

Yeah, so here's the thing: In my experience, "age" doesn't simply cause a computer to lose performance, with a few interesting exceptions. My sister has my 7 year old laptop which is running Ubuntu, and my parents still have my working Vaio which is even older than that, though the sound is out due to...complications.

The interesting exceptions I've found that come with age are: intrinsic manufacturer defects only made noticible due to stress over time (blown capacitors, RAM issues), or mechanical failure, in the case of fans and hard drives. Since you said you have another account that is running speedy fast, I'm willing to rule out hard drive, and if your system is stable, albeit slow, I'm willing to rule out all of the other common causes.

At this point, I'd say there is some bad voodoo giving your regular profile a case of the vibes, man. Copy your documents folder to a temporary location, delete the user, and then recreate it. Your cookies and whatnot will be gone, so any stored passwords you may have in your browser will be gone, and there will probably be other things you might want to try to save before pulling the trigger. I know some games like to put saved games and other information in application data of all the places.

Disadvantages: Minor to moderate PITA.

Advantages: Free, Beats a full reinstall from system disks you don't possess.

daedalus wrote:At this point, I'd say there is some bad voodoo giving your regular profile a case of the vibes, man. Copy your documents folder to a temporary location, delete the user, and then recreate it. Your cookies and whatnot will be gone, so any stored passwords you may have in your browser will be gone, and there will probably be other things you might want to try to save before pulling the trigger. I know some games like to put saved games and other information in application data of all the places

I read this thread just to suggest this.

Also, some of the tech support advice I read here makes me understand why lawyers try and avoid the IPquisition threads when they happen. A 3 year old processor is outdated garbage? I'm still using my 2007 era Q6600 at stock speeds on air and am playing Arkham City at maxed settings, 1920x1200. He said dual core, but not which, for all you know it's an I7 (which was released that year).

I'd try redoing the windows profile, and also possibly running a benchmarking suite under both the old profile and a new one to try and pin down the bottleneck. It sure doesn't sound like hardware if it runs OK as admin.

How many processes do you have going as you, vs Admin?