[The Fifth Horseman]

First of all, if they've been fiddling with the BIOS, how about restoring it entirely?

That did cross my mind, but I heard quite a few times about these mobos going havoc on a BIOS update attempt, so I don't want to risk that unless there is no other way.

Second, you might wanna try out a harddrive speed benchmarking tool? Slow harddrive, slow machine...

Will check it out, however I doubt that's the cause.

Perhaps you need to press the Turbo button.

Good joke. No Turbo function present.

Drivers for the motherboard? Usually if yours are old (or default) you can improve a lot

Tried to locate them. PcChips offer scandalizingly poor driver support for their older products. No drivers for the mobo itself were present on the driver CD either, so I'm stuck with the default Windows stuff here. At least unless someone here has a copy of proper ones.