I upgraded to a bigger faster hard drive with a bigger cache about 2 years ago, and early in 2010 I upgraded to Win7 Ultimate. But I use Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and Bridge, and I move around huge lots of huge TIFF photo files. That's where the slowdown comes from. I run out of memory.

I am set up for automatic updates, I am set up to defrag once a month (Win7 has some nice features) and I run my antivirus and spyware scans regularly.

I'll take a look at that online scan, Dan. Thanks. Rags, I would personally buy the quad core because of all of my Adobe software, it spreads out the work among the cores and gets it done faster. Even if the "speed" of the quadcore seems to be slower than the other one, it will still probably finish sooner. Finishing the job is the important part, isn't it? Seems to me these faster and faster machines are overkill, we can't detect the difference in most instances anyway.

SRS