Brutally slow computer

Hi folks. Back again with a problem. I assembled this computer as an upgrade for my wife, from a P4 2.8, back around Boxing Day. The system is as follows; Asus M4A88T-M LE MB, Athlon II X4 640 (3 gig). 4 gig ADATA 1600 RAM, on board ATI Radeon 4250, 1 Terrabyte Seagate HDD, 500 Watt Thermaltake PSU, Windows 7 Pro 32 bit.
This machine is slow as molasses, and probably slower than the machine it replaced. It is especially noticeable when trying to play flash games such as slots on Facebook. The video is choppy and the game plays very slowly. As comparison, my wife's I3 notebook breezes through those same games even while doing something else. If you go to view photos on face book, they take for ever to load.programs seem to be slow to open as well. it seems as if the machine is throttled down. This wasn't meant to be a high end system, but this seems a little much. I don't recall it being this slow when I built it. I do recall when my son built his old comp a few years ago with a dual core Intel, and 3000 series Radeon, on board, he was able to play WOW. At present the BIOS settings are pretty much all on automatic.
Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

 

Any yellow warnings in Start/ rht-clck Computer/ properties/ Device manager?

 

Nothing in device manager. Says everything is working fine.

 

take a look at the resource monitor if your running W7 (Ctrl + Alt + Del, click "Performance" then click "Resource Monitor")

see if you can see anything there

 

Nothing in resource monitor. 3% to4% CPU usage and more than 2 gig of memory free. It is slow even when I run Game Boost to shut down all unnecessary services. Thanks for the reply.

 

Only other thing I can think of is to reinstall your chipset and video drivers. Also, since your onboard video(I've always hated them) uses part of your RAM I'd check them with Memtest86 and boot to the disk making sure you first change the boot order in your BIOS to boot from CD. I'm just guessing here in trying to eliminate some common causes.

Even though the 4250 is not very strong it should work OK. How does a DVD movie play?

 

A DVD runs fine. I ran the Hot CPU (lite) test last night and everything checks out. All 4 cores running at full bore, and no memory errors. Benchmark score of 4492. I thought perhaps the system was throttling itself, but it seems to work when loaded. The flash games run faster in Chrome than IE 9, but still run like they would on an older comp, like my wife's older (4 + years) AMD notebook. My personal comp, a Win XP, Core Duo E6750, also approaching 4 years runs all these things flawlessly, although it does have an 8800GT. So at this point I'm not sure whether it is a software or hardware issue and whether a video card would solve the problem. It seems that most people I know are running basic comps with on board video and not having any complaints, with less CPU power, and older GPUs. Thanks for the reply.

 

Not just games, although it is more noticeable there. I don't know what version of IE it is running, although I assumed it would be 32 bit, since the OS is 32 bit. The problem exists also with Firefox and Chrome, although not as badly. I did find when trying it originally in IE, when a slot was spinning, holding the enter key would smooth it out. The same games played on the old laptop run smoother than this, although it uses XP. If it is going to take a video card to fix this, I will be disappointed. I guess trying a VC would be a solution, to test since it seems like it otherwise checks out. I may try to install an older game and see what happens, or a WOW trial.

 

I considered that it might be a Win 7 problem but the wife's notebook is running Win 7, 64 bit.