Suddenly slow performance

Thanks for working on this. You are correct, I was a bit too concise regarding technical details. I don't have an optical drive installed. I do have a flash memory card installed in the SD Memory slot for use as extra paging memory but I don't know if it makes a difference or if it's just filling up a memory slot. I put it in soon after buying the computer and I have not touched it since. There have been no hardware changes.

The hard drive is partitioned in 3 parts. There is a 'hidden' recovery partition. There is the boot partition c: and the 'Data' partition d: The PC came with these partitions pre-installed and I have not altered the partition scheme, though I have considered losing the D: partition and making everything one logical drive.

Anyway, that means I was copying files from one HD partition to another. Windows appeared to finish the copy well before I tried to shut the system down.

The server is my home LAN backup system (HP MediaSmart running WHS SP2). I have a workgroup LAN, not a domain. The server had been offline for several days when I encountered the problem, and was still offline both times I rebooted this AM. I took the server offline a couple of days ago when we started basement renovations (it lives in the basement) but after last night I decided it would be a good idea to get an up-to-date backup in case more problems developed; I did not boot the server until after the PC was working because there is no way I could have made a successful backup while the problem was going on. I'm told that some earlier versions of WHS could create problems with Win 7, but that the current version should not create problems and in any event the problem appeared and then disappeared during a time when the server was continuously offline.

I did discover one thing that MAY be relevant but I'm not sure. It appears that Windows Security Essentials updated its database yesterday evening but I'm not sure if the time matches up with the problems I saw and it does not make sense that a virus definition update would create that big a performance hit persisting into the next boot cycle. If I keep seeing problems when the AV updates I'll have to change AV.

Anyway, I hope this answers your questions?

I like Steven's idea of Indexing.

So, not a server or LAN issue as the server was offline. I have heard of anti-virus definition updates creating false-positives, but you usually get a virus warning when that happens.

A single platter hard drive partitioned into 3 partitions? My simple mind sees a certain logic in a laptop not being as speedy as a desktop in file copying, but that's discounted anyway as the file transfer had finished before you saw the slowdown.

I'm going with Steven's idea at the moment.

Just one thing though... Be prepared. If this is an early sign of imminent failure, you will need to do as much backing up as possible.

Mark