Let me begin by saying that I love my computer. I've given it a name, I eat dinner with it at least twice a week, I buy it expensive gifts, I pamper it with frequent defrags.
Despite all these lavish attentions it remains "stuttery". Much of the time it's fairly speedy, but several times a day for no particular reason it gets all stuttery and slow (webpages take forever to render, the mouse gets frozen, video files get caught in a loop, Yahoo Messenger freezes, it stops responding entirely, etc) even if I'm not doing anything particularly intensive. Sometimes in the midst of stutteriness it makes a "beep", which is pretty much exactly the same as the regular healthy beep on POST, except that it's not posting and is just in the middle of me writing a word document or something. The stutterry slowness can last anywhere from 30-40 seconds to 3-5 minutes and afterwards it seems to hum along fine. If I didn't know better I would say that it's like the computer is having a minor stroke and then recovers (or perhaps an epileptic fit).
This is my setup:
Processor: Intel Core2Duo E6600 w/ Arctic Silver Freezer 7 Pro
Memory: 4x1GB PC2-5300 Corsair Value Select DDR2 RAM
Motherboard: ASUS P5N32-SLI-SE-Deluxe Motherboard
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD4850 "Toxic" by Sapphire
Hard Disk I: SATA OCZ CORE SSD 60 GB
Hard Disk II: SATA Western Digital 2500KS 250MB
Power Supply: AKASA 460w Ultra Quiet
Operating System: Windows XP Pro
Nothing is overclocked, nor has it ever been. All of this stuff except for the OCZ SSD and 3 of the 1GB RAM sticks was setup in late August/September of 2006.
I know that the OCZ SSD is a likely culprit for stutteriness because of issues with SSD Drives, but I've followed pretty much all of the instructions found in various places (disabling prefetch, moving virtual memory to other drive, etc) but this has not yielded any improvement.
In an attempt to see whether it was a heat related problem I ran SmartFan and noticed something strange in the voltage readings, see screenshot:
I don't know anything about voltages and things of this nature, but it seems odd to me that the +3.3V reading is 0.00V, the +5V reading is 4.95V and the +12V reading is +11.78V, etc. Could these be the sources of the problems I'm having?
I also ran CPU-Z, see screenshot:
Again I am wholly ignorant of what much of this means, but it struck me as odd that the DRAM Frequency is 266.7 MHz, when the memory I have is 667 MHz (or so it says on the box).
Are the voltages or the memory speed the root of my problems? If so, any ideas how I can fix them? If not, any suggestions what I can do to figure out what is?
Many thanks in advance.