Windows 7 Graphics/Video/Games are slightly choppy

[dbz123]

Just installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit on my comp. Love it and everything seems to work great except I started to notice a little choppyness when watching YouTube videos or any other Flash Player vids in any browser (firefox/chrome/explorer). At first I thought it was just the browser, but also came to notice a longer load up time when opening heavy graphic applications such as Photoshop CS3 or 3Ds Max. Before installing windows 7, I was using XP and those applications loaded it up pretty fast. I even loaded up a Game and noticed upon entering a level or something, there were slight choppyness occuring when moving a character around in an environment. After a minute or so, everything runs pretty smooth I think.

Other than that, navigating around windows 7 and opening up basic applications like word, messengers and even playing .avi movie files, seems to run smoothly.

So I'm not sure what the problem is. Memory? Hardware? Browser updates? I've already updated my video driver to the lastest version as well. Here are my comp specs and if anyone has any solutions, please share!

AMD Phenom 9500 Quad Core Processor 2.2 GHZ
Radeon 3870 512MB PCI-E (latest ATI cataylst driver 9.1.2 or something like that)
ASUS M3A motherboard
4 gigs RAM (2 gigs of Corsair XMS2 PC2-5400 at 667mhz)(2 gigs of Corsair XMS2 PC2-6400 at 800 mhz)
Western Digital Caviar Black 500Gb (C drive)
Western Digital Caviar Black 1Tb (other drives)
Windows 7 Ultimate Retail 64 bit

 

[Highwayman]

the only weak link I can see is the video card really, maybe older drivers may work better as ATi cut off support from some models on the recent releases, as for the rest of the hardware is certainly upto decent gaming specs. I noticed you have 2 banks of ram rated for different speeds, have you set them all to the same speed as he slowest ram for max compatibility in your bios? as mismatching speeds usually cause all sorts of glitches.