whats the problem???

[soup lightning]

for a few months everything on my comp has been loading extremely slow. it takes a few minutes to boot up, the load times for ut, css, and bf2 are so so slow. it takes about 20 minutes for me to actually get in a server on bf2. all my programs start really slow. any ideas what the problem could be? ive defragged, done virus and spyware checks, used this registry cleaner thing and its still horrible. i have a asus a8ve delux mobo, 1 gig of ram, 6800gt, and a wd raptor. sometimes the hd makes this weird noise, it kind of sounds like a grinding noise. im not sure if it always has or not but its only 5 or 6 months old. could it be a problem w/ the hd?

 

[Bruce]

It's possible but ive seen some crunchy HD's that work fine.Boot with the bare necessities and see how it runs.Then replace stuff one at a time till u find the culprit.

 

[TheMajor]

Check for services taking up a lot of CPU time. Rightclick on task bar>task manager.