Ok heres my setup
http://www.kiukle.com/temp/editbay.txt

I`m using Premiere CS 2 and Photoshop CS2

Before I left for a month I was able to edit HD (m2t) fairly well. It loaded in slow, but once loaded into Premiere I had no problems with it lagging for longer than half a second every once in a while. If I scrubbed for maybe 10 seconds it would lock up but that was also rare to do. Now after coming back to work, the computer is lagging like hell. It loads the project the same, but working with it is not nice. Every couple of minutes it lags at least 5-10 seconds...it`ll just freeze premiere, won't update the monitor, then go back to business. I tried deleting old junk (about 30 gigs) off the system drive and then defragging with Ultimate Defrag...still no improvement. I just updated the NVIDIA drivers which were 1 year old, no improvement. What else could be causing this issue? I didn`t install anything when I came back, and it worked fine before my month away.

*EDIT*
I just tried turning down the acceleration on the Nvidia card, it said to use one setting if you have drawing issues, it seemed to work like it used to, except after a minute i got a warning saying Premiere is out of system resources....

Any recent Windows Updates?

not that i`m aware of. My boss said he only checked email on the machine once when I was gone. And I usually don`t update things when they pop up telling me to. I turned off all fancy things like sliding menu bars, transparent nonsense for files dragging etc, and still getting the lag problem.

If you have system restore on, check your restore points to if anything 'happened' while you were away. You may want to restore the system to a checkpoint when the machine was working well.

Is the correct amount of RAM being reported via the BIOS or OS?

how do i check the RAM reporting? I`ll check the system restore points as well.

There were 3 'system checkpoint' restores and one labeled "software distribution service 3.0". Any idea what that is?

how do i check the RAM reporting?
Click on Start, then right click on My Computer, choose Properties. The opening window under Computer you will show the CPU and RAM info.

how do i check the RAM reporting? I`ll check the system restore points as well.

There were 3 'system checkpoint' restores and one labeled "software distribution service 3.0". Any idea what that is?

Google "software distribution service 3". Looks like others are having issues with that.

I would restore to a point prior to that. (You always have the option to undo you last restoration). Turn off automatic updates so you won't get the distro again. Fire up Premiere and See if that helps.

what would have auto-updated google? I don`t have their task bar or anything...I just use gmail...

By "google" I mean do a search on the internet. Others have had issues with SDS 3.0, it's a part of windows update. As you've said before, you usually ignore updates by dismissing the notification boxes. While you were away, someone else allowed the update to occur?

Just run system restore to a point prior to that update and see if it that improves your editing performance. If not, then you can undo the restore (an option via the restore tool), and go forward.

This is but one of many articles on the Adobe website that deals with stuff like this. Read and do. If it doesn't solve your problem, delve deeper into the Adobe web site, it is a mine of information.

What has happened to your system may never be known, if it's a network "work" machine, hey, anything can happen. Maybe a complete re - load of the entire system wouldn't be out of order.

Whatever, read and see.

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402172&sliceId=1


CS

Tried what was there and still nothing. I can scrub the bar around fine, the computer doesn`t lock up, premiere doesn`t lock up...it just takes 10-15 seconds to refresh the monitor. I have it set on Draft quality....i just don`t get what could be going on. I uninstalled the microsoft updates as well, seemed to work for a day, then the problem started again :\