I've done everything I can think of to fix this problem, and nothing is helping at all. I don't even understand how this happened.

About a week or so ago I took home a friend's zip drive he uses for recording music, because it wasn't working with his mixer. It's an old 100MB zip drive. So I hooked it up in my machine to see if it would work in a computer. Windows takes unusually long to load, my machine being fairly high-end. The drive doesn't work and spazzes out a little, its light blinking constantly, so now that I know that it doesn't work I shut down and remove the drive. Upon bootting up again, I find the OS is still taking a while to boot, and I've been having problems ever since I booted up at that time. The computer just seems to lag a little whenever it's loading anything. Downloading seems to stress it the most, and every time my CPU usage spikes, any music I'm playing pauses for a split second and the speakers produce a high pitched squeeking noise.

I use my computer a lot for everything, working, gaming, etc. I built it about half a year ago, so it's still fairly new, and these problems are really affecting my time at the computer very negatively. If anyone has any suggestions as to why my machine is acting this way, please let me know.

Have you tried a System Restore Point from "about a week or so ago"?

I have slapped myself for not thinking of that myself.

That worked, thank you so much. I don't have any idea what that zip drive could have done, but it's fully resolved now. You have my gratitude.

glad to help!

let us know if we can help further.