So, before I go reformat...

...I'd like to see if anyone has any ideas on what could be my problem here.

For about a week now playing games (like Left 4 Dead, Audiosurf, World of Warcraft) has gotten a little annoying. Every minute or so for about 15-20 seconds my games go from playing fine and smooth to choking on a hairball. I've tried fullscreen, widescreen, whatever and the only games that seem to not be affected are Quake 3 (which, coincidentally, I installed a week or so ago), Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 and MVP Baseball 2005. I could play PES09 and Q3 in windows just out of curiousity but there doesn't appear to be a point.

To see if I could diagnose the problem, Audiosurf actually works best because I can leave it in free play mode, windowed, and have Task Manager open. Surprisingly, nothing seems to be doing ANYTHING much other than Audiosurf and the omnipresent System Idle Process. I am at a loss, mostly.

I installed fresh, new video drivers from nVidia to see if that would fix it? Nope. Maybe a defrag, but that's unlikely since I've got my drives defragging when they hit 50% fragmentation and they haven't hit 5% since the last time I did it. My only other options are to flash the BIOS (which I haven't got my heart set on, really). check to see if there's any dust/damage on my video card (since the issue seems video-related), and, of course, reformat. I'm hoping it doesn't come to that, since it feels like I've done it already within the last 6-12 months, but I'd rather have it be a software issue than a hardware one (like I need an excuse to go out and get a new video card/mobo-proc combo).

So, before I jump off a cliff, anyone got any ideas?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Thanks for the input guys. Just a couple counterpoints.

AcerBandit
My desktop is pretty clean to begin with (I only have a Game folder, the Recycle Bin, and another folder for all the music from the Video Game Music Quiz).

I don't have any Internet search bars, just the add-ons for AdBlock Plus, StumbleUpon and WeatherPlus, but I don't see why that would ruin my gaming, particularly if Firefox isn't open.

My main HD is actually half-full (it's a 500GB SATA) which surprised me. Most of that is in my music collection, which IS in my My Documents > My Music folder (thanks iTunes). All my pictures are in My Documents too. I don't mind moving all my music and pictures out of there if you think it's a good idea. Question though: my Games folder on my desktop isn't a shortcut to a folder on my main drive, it's a folder full of shortcuts. Should I change it to how you explained it, or is it fine the way it is?

I hadn't tried CCleaner in the past but I'll give it a go. I'll also defrag while I'm at work.

RacinReaver
Worse comes to worst, I'll try your suggestion, but since the drivers I had been using were working for several months (probably since I last reformatted), I think I'll just roll back to the previous build before I go back a year.

Most amazing jew boots

Well I did everything you suggested, Acer, but nothing seemed to work. I tried cleaning out my case out of desperation (to be fair, there was a healthy amount of dust inside) and that also didn't work, so I reformatted. (I'm now kicking myself for not exporting my iTunes Classic Rock playlist.)

Since I reformatted things seemed to have improved but to save myself any future aggravation (and to just finally upgrade) I popped on NewEgg and bought this. It's nothing spectacular, but there's a lot of numbers from 6600GT to 9500GT so I figure it'll be an improvement at the very least.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.