i5 2500, 8GB ddr3, GT440 1gb vga, AsRock B75 Pro 3 mobo...WD 750 and 1TB sata drives. I had Windows 7 x64 running for nearly a year, with no problem. Security Essentials + Comodo firewall. The only "problem" I had after a while was sluggish boot, lots of HDD grind on startup, and way too slow for amount of free space on all of my drives, including the system. So, I'm about to reset and format it all. This is my hdd setup; HD1: Partition C - 100 GB - mainly Windows only Partition D - 300 GB - photos, programs, videos, music Partition E - 300 GB - photos, programs, videos, music HD2: Partition F - all one partition, 1TB, all kinds of files. I backed up everything from HD1, the C, D and E partition, so I'm thinking of rearraging that disk to make Windows, and my programs (mainly Adobe software, Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, some 3D software) run swiftly. It shouldn't be any problems with formatting the first drive, right? Drive 2 shouldn't be affected? How could I optimize the drive to make Windows 7 x64 perform as fast as possible on my current computer?
There are lots of things you can do to tweak performance, but generally you need "proper" hardware to be optimally quick. Yours may be, I didn't look it up. Over the years i've done all sorts of things, but after a time I realized the marginal gain from most of them were minimal at best. Now days I just have a firewall and anti virus running in background; I can live without all the other stuff. Every software maker wants their package to be the quickest to start so they love things to start running at start up. I like autoruns to control that. I defrag about once a month on a schedule. With 64 bit you might actually benefit for lots of RAM, but even with memory there are practical limits.
I just bought another 8GB of RAM today, so I hope to have some extra breathing space working in Premiere and AE. The reason Im going with the fresh install is the damn malware that got to me last week. I was trying to burn mp3 CD for my car, found some m4a in my audio library, went on google to find m4a to mp3 convert, dowloaded the first link (i was in a rush - noob mistake, cant believe I did it) and voila - 20 seconds later I got the Search Certified Toolbar crap on my system. But prior to that epic failure of mines, I've noticed that my system was sluggish on startup..too much hard drive grind and noise after W7 login screen... I want to keep it as minimal and as quick as humanly possible without going the SSD route...I'll upgrade to SSD another time, but not now.