Well as the title describes, my computer gets extremely bad lag when using certain programs on the internet. some that i can think of right now are Zbattle (network program for the Zsnes emulator) Toribash (Game) and Starcraft (Game). Its not everything that does it,i play Warcraft III perfectly fine (or atleast last time i played it ran fine) and also diablo II as long as i dont host. This only happens when i play games over internet, LAN works perfectly fine. This started happening a few months ago, everything used to run smooth untill then. I believe it started after my computer recovered from a big problem, don't quite remember what it was, but i know that i couldnt get windows started, and the solution had something to do with going to the windows setup, and going to repair or something of the sort, and typing some command (don't remember what the command was). I might be giving too much information here, but i figured the more i add, the less likely i will have to add more to this later. Thanks in advance.

Pick one of the games that's not running correctly, like Starcraft, and uninstall then reinstall it. See if it behaves the way it should after that.

If that does the trick, try it on the rest.

I have already tried that before, doesn't help, and Toribash has been doing this from the day I installed it. My brother has the exact same kind of computer as me and his doesn't do this. I ran my virus scanners as well (forgot to mention that earlier)adaware and MCafee didn't fix it, but i did have a virus before that they couldn't fix, and i had to go find a new antivirus to get rid of it. So i guess it could be one of those really bad viruses.

Well, considering you had a big problem not too long ago I'd highly recommend you backup all the data that's important to you and do a clean install of the operating system.

A lot of times when something goes really wrong and you do a "repair" of the operating system you're still left with issues (like the ones you're having now) that can only be gotten rid of by doing a clean install.

Well I was hoping that wouldn't be the only solution, but it seems there is no way around it. By a clean install do you mean just reinstall windows, uninstall and reinstall windows, or reformat the entire hard drive and THEN install windows again? Just checking to see how far I need to go with this.

Ok, just noticed that the subject for some reason is HP pavilion zv6000... dont know how that happened, does there happen to be a way to change that?...

I don't know about changing the subject.

I'm not familiar with that model HP but I'd wager you didn't get any "recovery" or "restore" CD's with it (that contain the operating system). Most likely it has a recovery partition that contains the OS files.

If you want to format first (you don't have to) be careful to not format that recover partition.

You can tell Windows to format during the installation process, I'd do it that way myself.

Well you were half right, i didn't get a recovery disc, but they didn't even put a recovery partition on there... unless its hidden somehow. If i reformat i'll have to wait till next weekend though since i am going to need my computer through the week days. Untill then ill keep waiting for more solutions here, and earching for solutions, everywhere.

Watch the POST messages on bootup. There should be one that says something like "Press F? for recovery" or something like that. If you see a message like that, press the appropriate function key and it should take you to a menu giving you options. Likely to "repair" or "install" etc.

You don't have to do it, you could just reboot from there and lose no data or make any changes.

Look in Disk Manager (in Adminstrative Tools >> Manage Computer) and see what the partitions look like. If you have a small one on there that's not showing up as a drive in Windows, then that's likely the repair/restore partition.

Don't forget before doing anything destructive to data to do a good backup of everything you want to keep....

Well I haven't posted here in a while, mostly because I have been stalling this reformat because I didn't want to mess up my computer, but it has so many issues that it seems like this has to be done. I looked it up and Reformatting doesn't seem as bad as i thought anyways.

I checked and there is only 1 partition on my computer which is the C drive. So there is no recovery drive.

And i have a couple more questions i want to ask before i reformat the computer. Would i be able to simply make a second partition on my computer to store the files i want to keep, then reformat the main one? that would save me a lot of time if i could do that. And also, the only thing i need to do this is the windows install disk correct? I looked and saw that everything is in the disk and that i just delete the partition and re make it, but i'm just making sure.

Thanks for all of the help so far.