PC slowing down, time for an upgrade? Or just reformat?

[avelle]

Basically what the title says. I built this PC in early 2007.

The specs:
Asus P5N32-E SLI Motherboard
Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4ghz
2gigs of Corsair XMS2 Ram
evga 8800 gts 640mb
2 Seagate Barracuda 7200 drives
WinXp 32bit SP2

It still runs most things fine, though it seems sluggish when you open up various folders or applications. WoW in particular seems to be running noticeably worse than it was a while back. My main concern is that it's not pumping out the frame rates it used to. I know the system is dated but do you think I'll see any kind of noticeable gain from reloading windows? Or is this just a lost cause and I should suck it up and upgrade?

If I upgrade there seems to be a few ways I could go about this. A friend suggested that the games I play are not bottlenecked by the CPU and rather by the GPU, thus suggesting picking up a new card and possibly some more ram. I believe 32bit XP only recognizes 4GB of memory from any source, including video card so even if I pick up some ram and one of those hot new 1GB video cards I won't see the full benefit from an additional 2GB of system memory. So that leads to possibly upgrading to a newer OS which is more money and hassle.

So it's either going through the hassle of reformating in hopes it will return some of the performance back my PC once had, going part way and picking up a new GPU, or going balls to the wall and replacing the entire core of my system (mobo, ram, cpu, gpu). Any thoughts?

edit: I should probably mention my monitor is 1920x1200 so the system isn't running games at resolutions like 1280 etc.
edit2: I should also probably mention part of my concern is that when looking at my task manager, the PF Usage seems waaaaaaay higher than it ever used to be while playing games. It's easily over 1.3GB when I have WoW open, along with things like Vent, Trillian, Firefox and sometimes WinAmp. Things I've always run and never saw the system go over 1GB of PF Usage before. I get the feeling there's probably a lot of unnecessary shit in the registry from over the years, which is why I bring up the question about reloading.

[Mayareira]

That system shouldn't really need an immediate upgrade for random software and games like WoW. A card like 8800 definitely won't bottleneck your system when playing games like WoW. Crysis at high settings? maybe.

Formatting and reinstalling your system is the easiest short term solution for a performance boost...or let me say, performance recover. Instead you can check and see what applications you are running in the background and turn off unnecessary ones. Also, defrag your hard drive. Check and see what applications are using up your system resources and make sure you have enough RAM for what you are doing.

At this stage RAM would be the cheapest upgrade with highest returns but keep in mind that windows XP 32 bit doesn't support more than 3 gigs.

[avelle]

I see Windows 7 just went public so maybe I'll reformat and try that out. I could pick up an additional 2GB of ram for real cheap now apparently. I don't know what the hell happened but ram prices seem to have just crashed through the floor.

I kinda feel the same way you do in that the system should be fine for what I'm doing, it's just been doing pretty shitty in WoW lately and frankly if any game dives under 30fps it annoys the hell out of me. Though I somehow learned to live with it in FFXI. The harddrive gets defragged often, that was actually my first thought when I noticed the system wasn't running like it used to. I guess I really just wanted affirmation that reloading would probably rejuvenate my system. (Most of my reluctance comes from going through the hassle of backing up old data and patching behemoth programs like WoW and FFXI. Pain in the ass!)

[Olo401]

Yeah gonna agree on the extra RAM.. You can try cleaning your registry as well (a system reformat/reinstall will also do this, and is less tricky). You'd be amazed how much junk piles up in there over just a few months.

[Hosom]

Cheapest upgrade is as stated, more ram. Also, if you haven't already, use msconfig to decide what your pc loads up when it boots. A lot of applications load when your pc boots that aren't really needed all of the time. A good example is iTunes.

[levish]

That system shouldn't really need an immediate upgrade for random software and games like WoW. A card like 8800 definitely won't bottleneck your system when playing games like WoW. Crysis at high settings? maybe.

WoTLK expansion brought about some more graphical goodies (shadows/improved textures/new effects), my system started choking in new areas (pre expansion areas were more or less fine).

this was with a HD4870 at the same resolution x2 oversampling.

[Olo401]

Cheapest upgrade is as stated, more ram. Also, if you haven't already, use msconfig to decide what your pc loads up when it boots. A lot of applications load when your pc boots that aren't really needed all of the time. A good example is iTunes.

For this kinda thing I love playing around in the Admin Tools/Services control panel. You can figure out what you don't need loaded at startup through msconfig and tell it not to load without a major headache.

[Ragnell]

Google Tune up ulitities 09, it's hands down the best PC software for optimizing your pc, free 30 day trial.