Disappointing speeds with new CPU

[Fafnir]

Not sure if I was expecting too much but some things don't seem to be as fast as I expected following a major rebuild of my PC. In fact, Word often seems slower! I suspect something else is slowing it down as the problem is not consistent. Indexing is complete so I don't think it is that. Task Manager doesn't show any tasks taking an inordinate amount of CPU time. Nor does there seem to be any HDD activity at the time. And I am clean as far as viruses and other malware is concerned. I do use Kaspersky though and I have heard some concerns re this causing severe slowing down problems. Not sure what else I can look atto see what could be using up CPU time. Anyway, a 4 core should have plenty of capacity or am I missing something?

PC now boasts a Gigabyte GA-P55-UD5 motherboard, Intel quad core i7 2.8GHz CPU, 4 Gbytes RAM and a GeForce 6600 video card (GV-NX66T128D). Windows 7 Ultimate

Graphic software seems faster, especially video editing, so I assume everything is working! However editing text in Word does seem a lot slower. For example using Ctrl/arrow to scroll along a sentence word by word, seems to lag behind my key presses (about 3 words a second). Opening some files, especially Internet Explorer can be very slow.

An unreasonable technical question would be "what is wrong"! Too vague. But can you point me to a benchmarking utility I can use to see if I do (or don't) have a problem and if the former at least give some idea as to what reasonable question I can ask!

[Nick Peers]

Could be Kaspersky - it seems a little sluggish on my desktop PC, but I barely use that now so couldn't tell you for sure. See if there's an on-demand scan setting you can temporarily disable to see if it's the cause of your problem.

Also, running 64-bit or 32-bit Windows?

[Fafnir]

I'm running 32 bit although the hardware will cope with 64 bit (I think). However I assume I would have to upgrade a lot of my software if I upgraded to 64 bit. Upgrading Office, Photoshop, and a few other pricey programs would make it an uneconomic (I mean unaffordable!) move.

[Nick Peers]

I don't think it's a problem with 32-bit Windows, but your only issue with 64-bit Windows will be with sourcing 64-bit drivers. All 32-bit applications I know of (including Photoshop and Office) will run in 64-bit Windows with no problems - you'd basically get 32-bit performance, but if a dedicated 64-bit build was available, that might work a bit quicker (certainly not enough to be noticeable).

I'm guessing Kaspersky is probably the issue here - have a play with its settings in a safe offline environment and see if that effects the sluggish behaviour of your apps.