Today I have ordered a new Dell Dimension 9200 after countless attempts to get to the bottom of my problems with my current Dell Dimension 4600.

I have had the Dell Dimension since 2004 and it was running well for the first 6 months or so.

From then on something appears to have caused it to slow down considerably. Despite ordering a new PC, I am still keen to get to the bottom of this slow running PC so I can pass it on to my kids.

From what I gather it is still a reasonable spec PC but it is killing me waiting around as it slowly goes about its buiness.

Here is the spec

Dell Dimension 4600
Intel Pentium 3.6GHZ
2 GB Ram
GeForce 7600
Vista Ultimate

Anyway here is what I have tried so far to get to the bottom of the problem. Please note I have checked the compatibility of all new components.

Full Reformat and system reinstall. Strange thing I have noticed even since the first time I reformatted is the extremely long time it took to reinstall windows XP. It took about 3 hours whereas when I have reinstalled this on other peoples PCs it was definitely under one hour. I guess I should have contacted Dell whilst I was still under warranty about this but I didn't think too much about it at the time.

Upgraded the memory from 1gb to 2gb - this seemed to have no affect on the performace of the PC at all.

Added a second hard drive.

I have run hard drive diagnostics tests - all reporting everything is fine

I have run memory tests - again all reporting no problems.

I recently upgraded to Vista Ultimate (as I needed this for a job I was working on) and I think this was the straw that broke the camels back. Despite people telling me I have a system well capable of running Vista, it is incredibly slow.

So anyone who has kindly read my problem and has any suggestions as to the problem, please let me know what you think.

My suspicions are it is a hardware problem but I have exhausted all avenues that I have the knowledge of with regards testing for this problem.

Thanks in advance

Paul