Quad Core....you what?

[Squink]

I've just recently moved from:

1 (one) core 3400+ , 1.5Gb Ram, 6800U, 74Gb Raptor on XP 32

to:

quad core 6600, 4 GB Ram, 8800 GTX, 74Gb Raptor on Vista 64

What used to totally lock my system was when the DVD player spooled up. What used to slow my system down was when i flicked from WoW to desktop.

Now what totally locks my system (going from 1 to 4 cores) is when the DVD spools up and when the AV system updates (I've changed from one free AV to another one). What slows the system down is pretty much the same thing, with a complete rebuild from XP32 to Vista64. What a bargain eh, Windows can still get borked with vast amounts of free resources?

Can anyone explain why my system is only moderately more responsive than it was before (lol it's Windowzlolz is not necessarily a valid reason)? I was hoping that quad core + 4gb ram would have destroyed lockups, but it seems some things just aren't affected by extra resources.

 

[Squink]

The DVD reader is an LG model and probably about 7-8 years old. Fortunately I don't use it too often so it's something I can live with, but trying to install some mobo software off it recently was an absolute pain in the chuff (pressing ctrl-shift-esc repeatedly and having task manager pop up after 5 minutes).

I've noticed that the HDD is churning quite a lot so I have a suspicion that it may be the AV software trying to do a check every time I boot up, or something equally resource intensive.

I'll do some more digging around; not really had much motivation to troubleshoot after the hassle of building it all. I'm new to Intel, new to CPUs with more than 1 core and new to Vista. I probably just need to do some tweaking.