The other day my computer suddenly became very sluggish and has been working v e r y slowly. CPU usage is at or near zero and I still have plenty of RAM available (using less than 1 gig, have another gig free). I have my operating system installed on a separate partition, C. I formatted the partition and made a clean install of Vista and it still runs slow. The computer is 4 years old but was still running Vista and even CS3 just fine since it is maxed out at 2 gigs of ram. Any ideas or suggestions?

the little that i do know about vista is that you need at least twice the RAM you've got. also, there's a good chance your hard drive is pretty full and/or very fragmented after 4 years, so naturally, your system will have to work harder to find the information it needs in good time.

my suggestion, which i think everyone will jump on me for, but seems pretty logical for you at this point if you expect to be doing a lot of post processing and image work: sounds like it would be a great time for you to buy a mac and be done with your PC problems. don't worry, its a lot less painful than you might think.

good luck.

I know in my experiance the major thing that slows you down with windows is your harddrive. Keeping at least 20% of your hard drive empty is a major performance booster. Also defragmenting your hard drive once a week helps. I'm not sure where you do this in Vista but in XP you would go to My Computer -> Right Click on your HD -> Go to properties -> Tools -> Defragment Now -> Select the hard drive you want and click Defragment. You really need to keep that 20% of free space though in order for the process to be effective. This is important for all of your hard drives not just the one that windows is on because it effects how fast your computer can read files. Hope this helps some.

i agree jeremy.

yet another reason why windows is so damn lame. oh well...

2 gigs is plenty for LR. I bet it's a hard drive or mo board issue. Or it could be bad memory.

jason, even if it is enough for lightroom, 2gb is NOT enough for vista.

It sounds like a hard drive thing....possibly power, too. My computer got super sluggish after about 3 years and it turns out my power supply was going. I would also run some diagnostics ont he hard drive and see if it's spinning at the right speed, etc.