PC Running slow

[56curious]

Okay so I have no clue why this is happening. Its been like this for a month and a bit now and I really need an awnser. My PC boot speed is 1:14 on a HDD but this isn't what i'm worried about. Sometimes my desktop loads the start bar with a backscreenm before loading up any icons & backgrounds. Sometimes it just takes 20-30 seconds to load up a program in the first 3-4 minutes. What I don't understand is why this is happening on my Gaming PC. Here are my specs:

AMD - FX - 8350
8GB Ram
Palit GTX 760 Jetstream 2 GB
1TB HDD
750Watts PSU
Asus M5A78L-M Mobo
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

I run most of my games on max(or close to max) at a lovely 55-60+ FPS and this is no problem. However. What I have noticed is my PC as froze (As if its going to BlueScreen) and then after about 5 seconds it carrys on as normal. I have checked windows event logger as soon as this problem happend and there is no error there. The only errors I have seen are SChannels (No clue what these are).

Now when I was cleaning my PC once(about 2 months ago) I knocked my heatsink. I took it to the guys who built my PC in the first place and they fixed the issue and they also did a 'service' on it too. Here is what they did:

Ran hardware tests - passed
boot to windows
ran bluescreen viewer - related to network card
updated all drivers and firmware or network card
fixed a bluesreen issue on one of my games

Run malware scanner - no threats
run system file checker - no integrity violations found
run disk clean-up - removed 48GB worth of temp files (guessing GTA V's unzipping was alot of it)
run disk defrag - disk was 25% fragmented
run windows updates
run GPU tests - passed stress tests

So after I got it back, this was the first time I had the black screen and no icons problem. This happend once and then after a restart, it was fine for a few weeks.

So now i'm left to asking you guys for some much needed support. I only want people who know what they are talking about and can help me fix the issue. If you need anymore details, then you can ask for them when you reply.

P.S Quick things:

I'm buying a new GFX card and an SSD at christmas, may buy some RAM too, get it up to 16GB.
I noticed when looking in taskmanger that RAM usage was about half of what ive got and my CPU usage is always below 35-50%. On my HDD I have 577GB free and everything is on the same HDD.

 

[hang-the-9]

Odd pauses and slow loading can be a hard drive issue. Look at what your hard drive brand is and download a test utility from the vendor see if it checks out OK.

A good start to this trouble-shooting this is to re-install Windows clean after backing up your files and whatever settings you want to remember (Favorites, email settings, etc...).

SSD is a good idea, video card and RAM not a good thing right now, the 970 is still a fast card unless you are going to be playing on over 1440 resolution at high settings, and there is not much performance boost if any going from 8 to 16 gig of RAM.