Yup, with such regular ocurrences looks like i may be able to start a new TV series about the computing problems I really don't need to deal with.
First off, there is this old problem that I had been tolerating without me even realising it - that "spanking" computer I assembled last year (just to play World of Warcraft) failed miserably on the 3Dmark 06 basic tests, rendering beautifully elaborate scenes at a blazing pace of 1-4fps. Being so out of touch with the magnitude of capabilities modern hardware possess, I thought it was only natural that my computer would not render smooth scenes given the sheer level of detail. Well I have been day-dreaming all along; even laptops powered with decent mobile GPUs can replay those scenes with heck a lot more frames than mine. No wonder I had to downplay the graphics of World of Warcraft all the time.
Reading around the Internet I gather systems similar to my setup (Athlon64 3000+/Geforce 6800 GS) should score around 3000 onwards with 3Dmark 05 tests; tweakers have even managed to attain 6000+. My score? Peaks at 1400; a max of 8fps. Everybody tells me that is not right. Hey, I knew that. And nobody can tell me just where the bottleneck is. You just can't tell how slow you are until you have a MotoGP racer zoom pass you on your tricycle.
And while I try to uncover the truth of this malingering desktop computer, I simultaneously fine comb the Internet on information on how to remove some trojans that have invaded my laptop. Seemingly new bogies, wnset.exe and svchots.exe appear in my process list - items that immediately aroused my suspicision. Bad news alright - looks like that bogus email on Internet Explorer 7 was so lethal I only needed to look at it without responding in any way. Those are some pretty high dosages of system toxins, and my CA Security Center cannot even detect them, let alone attempt to remove. I managed to cut off svchots.exe by manually removing the offending registry key in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. But wnset.exe is one tough parasite highly resistant to any drug I administer.
That annoying process pops out of nowhere despite me killing it. I cannot determine its origin, but I highly suspect it comes from the self-registered COM component {8D5849A2-93F3-429D-FF34-260A2068897C}, pointing to c:\windows\system32\lfhs76ghf.dll. I cannot delete that file since Windows Explorer itself is the one maintaining a lock on it. It persists even in Safe Mode, and some "clever" renaming of the key can't save the day either. Just about everything I have searched does not offer any viable manual solution to remove it. So now it's past 3am, and I have not touched anything necessary to learn how to program sumo-wrestling robots yet. Bah, I'm off to bed.
UPDATE 2nd June:
sometimes it takes the gritting of teeth and commiting to some drastic measures. In this case it appears to be easy enough to give Dr. Delete a call, and he will initiated a delete-on-restart operation for whatever locked file I designate. Sweet. wnset.exe has not appeared ever since.
On other news, it looks like 64-bit Windows Vista does not like to share with legacy 32-bit operating systems. The installation of winVista totally disregarded my existing winXP instance and wrote it off the boot menu completely. I cannot dual boot back to winXP now. Sweet. winXP has not appeared ever since.
UPDATE 2nd June, after spending the day researching:
3Dmark05 score of 5248 now. By one very simple method that did not involve nuclear overclocking and nitrogen cooling (oooh but i love the thought of that....). I gave the video card a visual inspection, and saw that the PCIE power connector did not have a power cord attached. The fine folks who assembled my computer at the shop a year ago either forgot all about it since the PSU that came with the casing did not have a specialised PCIE plug, or they were totally ignorant of such cards' high-calorie consumption. So the past year my graphics card had been an energy-star underperformer. Boy, just think about the great savings in electrical bill when I was playing all those while....
On the operating system front, it appears I "lost" winXP because the winVista DVD was in the drive, and its boot-up sequence will cause it to look for a Vista installation. Once I took that out, the system would boot with winXP again. What's happening here? If I try setting the winVista-installed disk as the first disk the BIOS should boot from, it would complain of a non-boot partition? Huh? As it turns out, the boot partition is on the only PATA IDE disk in the system. PATA disk 0 - boot for winVista, but winVista resides on SATA disk 1. winXP resides on SATA disk 0, which will "win" when the DVD is ejected. Really neat chain of dependencies there.