Just Built New System, Extremely Slow

[fmlizard]

I just built myself a new system and it is very slow, for reasons I cannot figure out.

Basic specs of what I built are:

E6400 Core 2 Duo processor
Abit IB9 Mainboard
2GB Corsair DDR-800 RAM
GeForce 8800 GTS PCI Express
2X 250GB Hard Drives, one internal, one external
Windows Vista Ultimate, 64 bit edition

This system should scream, shouldn't it? In SANDRA, this system scored 800%-1000% slower than the benchmark system and even slower than my old Athlon64 3000+ machine, which was 2 years old.

My CPU monitor shows Core 1 in constant 100% use, even with absolutely nothing running in the background right after a clean boot. Apps such as iTunes bog the processor down to where the whole interface gets choppy, and it even is laggy and disjointed when performing the transition effects in Vista, an operation even my old machine could do flawlessly.

Anyone have any idea where I am going wrong here?

 

[rivan]

I'd put my money on your 64-bit Windows not liking a driver.

 

[Roguestar]

iTunes is a crock of sh*t anyway, it's clunky and slow on my PC too. Does the rest of it feel slow or is it just scoring low in SANDRA? Could it be that you need proper Vista 64-bit drivers that you haven't got? Does Vista-64 run some 32-bit programs with a little difficulty? (vista gurus correct me here plz)

Run AVG-free 7.5 and CCleaner and keep an eye on which processes are using the CPU in taskmanager.

Edit: beaten by rivan already.

 

[fmlizard]

64 bit Windows was one of my suspicions too, though I haven't heard of this problem for others. I can rule out viruses and spyware processes because all I have on this brand new box is Windows, and a couple things like Firefox and iTunes.

When I go look at my system processes, I see that almost nothing is running, yet my CPU Core 1 shows 100% use constantly, and the performance CPU usage graph in Windows is usually around 60-70%.