Kay here's the setup:
Custom built about 3yrs ago
XPpro (all updates and hotfixes installed)
A7N8X Deluxe rev1.4 (all bios and chipset drvrs current)
AMD 1.4 (never O/C'd)
512MB pc2100DDR
80gb Maxtor (Primary boot, and program files drive)
20gb W.D. (Backups drive, MP3s, photos and what-not's)
Plextor 16/10/40
Delta DVDrom
GeForce3 (never O/C'd)
Now here's the deal,
I've been using CloneCD for burning backups for all my music for a long long time. Used-to-be I could burn a full audio disc in 5min or so with the Plexy maxed out at 16x. In fact when the burn would start the buffers would drain in seconds. Now it takes me well over 10, sometimes 15 min and the buffers never use up more than 97%. Used-to-be I could burn a disc with Clone and listen to MP3s with Musicmatch all at the same time no prob and still get a good burn in 5 min. Now if I even THINK about launching Musicmatch while Clone is running the machine lags reeeeal bad, and Musicmatch playback is choppy and unlistenable. For that matter if I try to open ANYTHING while I have a burn going on (even the TaskManager) it takes at least a minute or so to get the program fully launched and in full display. CloneCD is not the only burn ute. that has problems, Roxio6 is slow too.
This never used to happen, when I say never I mean I started noticing a slow-down about a month or so ago. I make a habbit of defragging once a month on a need-it-or-not basis (just defragged last week with Norton's Speed Disk), I also run SpyBot religiously. Have plenty of room on my HDD's (the 80G'r has 60G's free-space). I don't have any unnecissary garbage launching at startup. In fact MSCONFIG/startup is down to less than six items starting. Systray has, at most; NortonA/V, ZoneAlarm, Immersion, and the necissary MSN dial-up apps running at any one time. I've ran "chkdisk /r" from XP's startup disc to no affect. The only other clues I can give you are some warnings in the event log; event= warning, source= cdrom. Error properties say, "An error was detected on device/ DeviceCdRom0/ during a paging operation".
I need your help! Why is this happening suddenly? Is there something I can do other than reformat? I have a Dial-up connection (not by choice mind you) and I'm really not looking forward to D/Ld'ing all the patches, drivers and updates.
ANY help, I mean ANNNNYYYY help is much appreciated.