Did a defrag (Norton Speed Disk) last night, wasn't too fragged to begin with so I didn't see any change.

I will try a chkdsk tonight, see if it helps.

My biggest "WTF" is comming from Windows, asking me to re-activate. I hate calling them...

And no, I don't think I need to upgrade my hardware (unless it's a HD issue). I do play a lot of games and run a lot of server stuff (Apache, MySQL), but the server stuff I turn off during normal operation.