Well, ok, maybe it isn't inexplicable per se. But, at the very least, I can't figure it out. I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium with a 3.33GHz Celeron D, 2 gigs of RAM and a GeForce 8400 GS. Up until about 2 months ago everything ran well. Not perfect, but pretty good. I was able to watch videos and run some relatively heavy-load games at high or even max settings (Farcry 2, Borderlands). But about 2 months ago everything went to hell. I can't recall any new programs that I've installed or any other kind of software changes. Even stranger, it somewhat works better in safe mode, although still not at the level it was working at before, which to me indicates it may be a combination hardware/software issue. I can't find anything in the task manager that seems to have a particularly high CPU usage (other than the idle process, although that's to be expected) at any one time, although a few programs seem to fluctuate, especially Firefox and Peerguardian. However, closing these programs doesn't seem to really help make anything run better. Even worse is Chrome, which, although I don't really like it and it hasn't run too well on any computer I've had, I could usually rely on as an alternative to Firefox if I had any problems with it. Chrome barely even runs now. It's slow, laggy, and can barely perform even the slightest functions, such as opening an image or a new tab. Videos are also completely unwatchable, whether they're hosted online (Youtube, Hulu, Dailymotion, etc) or local files on my hard drive running on Windows Media Player, Media Player Classic, VLC, or anything else. They're stuttery, laggy, they get out of sync, and sometimes just crash altogether. Most games I try to start suffer the same problem, even the ones that worked alright before. I've exhausted almost everything I could think of as being a problem. I've run virus and spyware scanners, tested my hardware in various ways, booted in safe mode (as I mentioned before, it ran a little bit better, but not perfectly), booted in XP and Vista (same problems), and checked other threads on here. Unfortunately since with nonspecific issues it's hard to get general advice, I haven't been able to find any help. I can grab any kind of diagnostics needed. Anybody have any ideas?
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