How to troubleshoot spiking CPU/Hard drive graph?

I have narrowed down my serious start up degradation on a Gateway ML3109 to
spiking CPU and Disk activity as I start up and do almost anything on the
notebook. Something is making various services, apps and drivers throw up
errors about taking too long to start-up and shutdown. I thought I had
narrowed it further to Sound drivers but updating and repeated reinstalls
only reduced the sound-related errors. I'm almost sure this is hardware
because I have done two clean reinstalls of just the Vista Basic system and
it doesn't change. I thought it could be the generic drivers Vista's install
disk uses, so I replaced every driver I could find on gateway's website for
my model (only chipset wouldn't download, saying my system didn't "meet
minimum requirements" even though it was downloaded from Gateway for my
serial number) but the result is just fewer errors at each startup, or
shutdown, in the Performance-Diagnostics>Operational log accessed on the
Advanced Tools panel. These errors (sometimes Critical) are for different
services/apps/drivers each time although Management Console, Prefetch, Error
Reporting, Volume Shadow Service, Sound (including PCI slot, driver, and
service) are frequent offenders. The startup and shutdown time are about 3
minutes each, up from 20 seconds previously. It is the critical error on each
startup (degradation error 100) that bothers me.

Can someone tell me the exact procedure to troubleshoot these as I watch the
performance graphs spike for CPU, hard disk, Memory? By the time I get to the
log after startup, it is too late, but the spikes continue anyway even though
no additonal errors are thrown up except at startup and shutdown. The error
log in Administrative View is clean. I have no viruses, now or previously. I
run no startup programs except Avast. I keep it CCleaned and Auslogics
Defragged daily. Thanks.

I should mention that I have a gig of memory and have run the Memory
Diagnostic, chkdsk and Lifeguard bootable hard drive repair scan. All were
clean.

"gregrocker" wrote:

Your Gateway just cannot run Vista properly... Celeron + 1GB RAM would not
cut it.
Michael

"gregrocker" <gregrocker@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:332F7CCB-64AF-4AE4-9687-4C0D818C4DEB@xxxxxx