Steam lags and crashes randomly HELP

[DC9884]

One of my HD's was recently fried by a lightning storm, so i had to reinstall windows xp on a new drive that i bought, however I found my old secondary HD, with steam on it, to be fine, so i left it alone. I updated XP (including sp2) and got all the latest drivers (catalyst 4.10), and now i lag horribly in all my steam games, and on occasion the computer crashes to a non respondent black screen and sometimes restarts on its own. Before all this i got about a constant 120 fps in CS 1.6, now i get 80 max when alone and around ten with other people and gunfights on the screen. This is in D3D, in openGL, im at 30 alone and about 5 with people. This doesnt change no matter what my resolution. My ping is usally around 40 or so. (DSL). For comparison i get a solid 45 fps in doom3 on medium 800x600.

Windows XP 2002 build 5.1 (2600) w/ SP1 and 2 and .Net1.1
nforce A7N266-E
Athalon XP 1800+ ~1.5 ghz
Soundblaster Live 5.1
Radeon 9700 PRO catalyst 4.10 w/ AI and CCC
DirectX 9.0c
512mb DDR Ram
130 Gb Deskstar 7200rpm (w/ windows)
80 Gb Western Digital 7200rpm (w/ steam)

Any suggestions appreciated.

 

[DC9884]

anyone at all?

 

[Mujuro]

1) Run Autoclave on both drives
2) Clean out your computer
3) Reinstall Windows
4) Windows Update, Drivers, DirectX
5) Install Software

Do that and then come back please...

 

[DC9884]

um, im not gonna erase everything which just took me 40 hours to reload. I've run every driver, registry, HD, and spyware cleaner i know, and my windows install is a week old. Im lucky to still have what i do from when my comp died. Everything on my comp is completely up to date. (Bios, catalyst, sound, mobo, dx 9.0c, SP2, SP1, .net, everything. Do you think SP2 is the issue? Not only does it run much much slower, but after about a haalf hour itll crash to desktop, crash to a unresponsive black screen, or the computer will restart unprovoked (this happened in photoshop CS once as well, but no where else). I dont know what else i can do.

 

[Speedingorange]

my freinds comp got nailed by lightning lots his modem... his pc is so freecked up now... jus wont start or does then randomly crashes out.... basically u may have to replace it... coz something in ur hardware is teribly unreleiable.... prolly ur grafix card....

check it out though

 

[DC9884]

how would i know if its fried or not? When the comp restarts and boots again it windows says it was a driver error but doesnt know which one. So would it just be catalyst 4.10 or my whole card?