Well, before they jumped up in priority, my 3d apps and games ran fine, but since then, they get maybe 1-2 fps, though they report something like 12-15 fps (still less than half of what was normal). ...

Okay, these processes have always ran at normal priority, but now they have jumped up for some reason. I can't change the priority manually w/ task manager b/c windows says that they're critical...

Sorry, my 30 min edit window elapsed.

Archiving:
IZarc
http://www.izarc.org/

Office Software:
OpenOffice
http://www.openoffice.org

Regular System Maintenance:
Auslogics Products
I recommend at least picking up the free software, the defrag seems to be much better than...