after I reformatted, I noticed installations took 2x as long, games are shaky and videos stutter, and then I realized why this is happening because cpu usage is being used by these programs like crazy, installations usually were at 100%. This never happened before! My pf usage is very low too so some programs went smooth on my desktop.. can anyone tell me what's making cpu usage spike so high?

Check which service is taking 100% CPU time, by looking at the "Processes" tab, when you bring up the Windows Task Manager (use Ctrl-Alt-Delete).

Remember the name of the process, and then END it.

Use the search function under Start-search and search for the name of the process that is taking 100% CPU time to determine what program is causing it.

What did you find?

Noo whenever I watch videos, play itunes or games, I noticed that they all use up to 100% or try to. If I end them then I can't do anything on my computer then... graphics stutter a lot and this never happened before. Also I just reformatted and its weird it just started happening

You did update to the latest drivers right? Including chipset drivers? Uninstall all the old drivers first.

Go to the device manager tab, by Start/Run/ and typing compmgmt.msc.

Under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, double-click the Primary IDE channel, advance settings tab and see what the transfer mode is. It should be at least ultra DMA. If it is PIO then that's is the slowest mode, and can causes the symptoms you've mentioned.

Try disabling hardware acceleration in the sound drivers first, and see if you still have the same problems. Next disable hardware acceleration in the video drivers.

In the control panel, select sound and audio devices -- audio -- advanced -- performance, to disable sound card hardware acceleration.

To disable video card acceleration, right-click on desktop - choose properties, then troubleshoot.

If any one of these fixes the problem, I'm pretty sure it's a driver problem.

An example is when Installing new drivers that overwrite older drivers and not letting them to be overwritten will result in a mix of old and new which can cause all kinds of grief.

In some cases, you will need to manually update the drivers, instead of using the automatic feature.

Let us know, how it goes...

It was on that mode, and just now my comp is working fine again xD, thanks a bunch.. oh yea, does pio mode on secondary ide channel affect anything? Right now its on that and yea all my drivers are updated but I saw directplay8 errors in dx diag O_o how do u fix it

Is your CD-ROM connected to the secondary ide channel? If it is you probably have an older ROM drive connected. Usually the newer ones, i.e. DVD burners will have at least Ultra DMA 2.

If you do have a new ROM drive, try changing the setting to DMA.

So that's what it is.. OK thanks man!