Computer lagging on start up

I reformatted my computer in May and installed 64 bit vista... it was running fine but gradually it started to slow down... now it takes forever to shut down and takes alot more time to startup... i have 6 gigs of ram so its not my ram... nothing is running in the background with msconfig... disk has been defragmented several times... ran spybot and antivirus scans... thoroughly cleaned out every part of the physical computer and used 2 cans of air duster... only thing i can think of is that the hardware is starting to degrade... so my two questions are:
1) If the hardware is starting to degrade is there any way to check the components?
2) Could it be anything besides the errors i listed above?

 

Did you check the vista tweak guide?

 

well the vista tweak guide seems to be a way to increase your performance... however my performance was not always slow... it has worked very well for me in the past even before my reformat... without needing to tweak anything... do you think that there is a specific tweak that i should try out? i've done most of the suggestions that are given...

 

Might want to point out that he has a raid 5 setup. I would check the hard drives for errors with chkdsk although that could take a LONG time for you and you cant use the computer during that process.

 

Hardware doesn't just "degrade" like that.

And you don't need the tweak guide to get good performance with 64-bit Vista... especially with 6 gb RAM.

What's your CPU and memory usage like in Task Manager?
If cpu is high at idle, could you go to the Processes tab, Show for all users, click the CPU column to sort, and see what's eating your CPU?
Also... you have SP1 installed, right?

You may also want to re-run the Windows Experience Index test... it may give you an idea of what's slow -- RAM, hard disk, etc.

Oh yeah... are the only slow things the startup and shutdown? Or is general usage slow too?

When did you upgrade the RAM to 6 gb? Or did you start out with that. 6 gb could be making startup take longer. It might help to turn off Superfetch.

 

i use about 10% of my cpu with wmp aim and firefox running along with 1.7 gigs of ram
yes i am running SP1
things are slow on startup and shutdown and programs take a long time to start up... i would click open a program and before it used to be instant... now it would not show up for a while then be there and it runs fine...
i started at 2 gigs of ram switched to 4 before reformatting and then put it on 6 a week ago... so it was at 4 gigs and still running strangely....
ive experienced slow performance like this before but usually it ran fine after a disk cleanup defrag and a dust out of the computer...