Poor PC performance

[andysocial85]

My PC is only a few years old, I bought it pretty cheap and I know it is very basic as I just wanted it as a platform to do some academic work on, not for gaming or anything else really. When I bought it, it ran pretty quickly but now it runs really slow even just trying to open new windows on web browsers or having a couple of basic programs open like Word, I have almost 1Tb of free space and have 8Gb of RAM, is this just a case of weak hardware or is there potentially something I can do to speed things up?

In the task manager the CPU usage is always 98-100%

UserBenchmarks: Game 11%, Desk 19%, Work 14%
CPU: AMD E1-2500 APU - 10.4%
GPU: AMD HD 8240 - 1.8%
HDD: WD Blue 1TB (2012) - 97.9%
RAM: Kingston ACR16D3LU1KFG/4G 2x4GB - 12.6%
MBD: Packard imedia S2185

The RAM performance is in the first percentile and should be performing far better (51% as opposed to 12.6%).

Any ideas?

 

[CountMike]

When was last time you reinstalled OS ? Windows can get really dirty thru time.