slow computer just curious

I am just curious. I am running

AMD Athlon 64 FX51
1024 Mb Dual Channel Corsair Pro Memory
2 120 Gig Seagate SATA Hdd
Radeio 9800XT Vid
Win Xp Pro w/ SP2

it not like I don't have power and I am only using 1-5 % of my cpu
power and have 544mb of Physical Memory Free with a commit charge of
338M / 2459M and Outlook is running slow and I am getting buffer
underruns burning dvds at 8x with my Pioneer A09XL . I am underrun
protection on but it keeps going down and taking 20 minutes to burn a
full DVD.And WinRar is taking forever to extract now. I mean pretty
much everything is running way slower than it should be and I am not
using 10% of my computer power. I just formatted and reinstalled
Windows about a month ago and it was working great but now it has
slowed down now so much that I am seeing 2.5ghz Celerons running some
progs faster than mine. I have all the new updates and all the newest
drivers for all my hardware. Why would anything run slow when it is
not using my CPU or Memory and I am only using 338mb or my page file

 

hi there,

from what you say i´d think there´s something wrong with either your HDDs or the hdd controller (a decent hdd should do ~5x the transfer rate a dvd burner is writing at...), my first shot would be reinstalling the chipset drivers (i assume you´re using the mobo´s storage controller).
also, do the HDDs/controller show up in the device manager correctly?

 

Do a scan for malware mate (Virus and spyware), you may have a trojan or something hogging your CPU.

 

Try a defrag. Simple but effective.