Reinstalled Vista, HD's been running slower ever since

[ZombieRitual]

So about 4-5 weeks ago I was forced to reinstall Vista 64 Home Premium. For some reason my computer just didn't recognize my Windows install; my guess is an update on 10/14 somehow didn't install properly on my computer. I can't be sure, I simply had Windows set to automatically update. I have multiple drives and thankfully my primary drive had unused space where I reinstalled the operating system to and my old windows install was somehow retained and I didn't lose all the data I had.

The big issue is that after applying all the updates (except the one from 10/14), including SP1, I noticed my hard drive access time still seemed sluggish. Just something like opening a folder on one hard drive, and then opening a folder on another hard drive, I noticed the folder would take up to a few seconds to display the contents. Before SP1 was released this would happen fairly often but after I updated this went away. I figured it would go away again after I installed SP1, but to no avail this time. I'm also thinking this is what is causes WoW to run slowly too. The latest expansion made it a bit more stressful on machines, but my Radeon x1950xt 256mb is more than enough to handle it, as well as my 4 gigs of DDR2 and Core 2 Q6600. Anyone have any thoughts as to what I can do to change this?

 

[ZombieRitual]

Anyone who can help me with this?

 

[KGB]

Is your new install still indexing the HDDs?

Vista will index the files on the HDDs to help facilitate faster searches but the indexing can be a bitch.

 

[sturtles]

It could be that the vista64 is a less often used platform, hence not tested well enough, resulting in issues on some specific PCs.

Next is the check your HDD for sector failure. This often creates random lockups and error messages

 

[ZombieRitual]

This was still happening a month after I'd reinstalled, so I doubt the indexing takes that long. How would I check my HDD's for sector failure? I haven't been getting lockups and error messages though, just observed some slowness opening folders and running WoW.