My comp is 2 years old. Still powerful enough, all recomended specs for something like crysis apart from the gfx card which is just a Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512mb. But my comp was startin to seriously lag even doing things that it used to do fine.

I guessed it was from all the baggage it had picked up over the two years of usage, installing stuff and things that are very hard to get rid of.

I backed up important stuff on and external HDD, wiped the HDD and re-installed the OS. Then when I downloaded all the programs again I started with FF, and noscript so any malware or spyware would be stopped at the first gate. Then got spybot and AVG or FreeAV.

Spybot used to show up roughly 50 infections daily of advertising companies trying to install trackers onto my machine. Now I get 0 infections daily.

I tried loads of things to speed up my comp, and starting fresh was the only thing that worked.

Can we have his system specs? Specifically CPU [specific model name, not just 'Pentium'], graphics card [again specifics, not just 'Geforce' and the RAM amount] and the RAM amount.

Run dxdiag and tell us the CPU and RAM from the first tab and the graphics card from the Display tab, please.

e.g. mine is:

CPU: Core 2 Duo E6400
Graphics: Radeon X1950 Pro
RAM: 2GB DDR2

I would never guess you had an Intel CPU Soleron.

It was better value and lower power consumption than the AMD at the time.

I'm not a fanboy...

What Theo said is extreme and really a last resort, but is likely to work if the problem has arisen recently. Formatting the HDD and reinstalling the OS can do wonders.

You can also run msconfig (Run>type 'msconfig', & enter) to get rid of any unwanted processes from running at startup. Try this before the ole' format.

I know you're not a fanboy, but I still thought you had AMD hehe.

AMD is also cheaper.

It wasn't when I bought my PC - the alternative was the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ which was similarly priced but used more power.

I wish i could get his specs. He's kinda oblivious to whats in it i guess. Bought a friends PC he built himself. Just know it's got 3 gigs of ram and 9800 GT card.

I guess he tried overclocking it... and it somehow fixed some of the problems... but you shouldn't have to overclock a 9800 GT to play TF2...

So it's really confusing.

Just right click on my computer and click properties