Solved Should the Hardware Diagnostic slow my new computer to a crawl?

Okay, so I've had this HP Pavilion with Vista 64 bit less than a week (see specs below) and it's much much faster than my old Dell model [with XP] BUT today I was running a scheduled Hardware Diagnostic and it took like 30-40 min. and towards the end of it I tried to change the Power management so it would not go to Screen Saver mode (as it already had) and when I tried to do so, it took like 3 min. for it to open the Control Panel, 3 more minutes to open the Power Options dialogue, 2-3 more minutes to open the sub-menu there, and so forth - altogether about 8-9 minutes to do this simple task of changing Power Options while running hardware diagnostics.

I can understand that Hardware Diagnostics might take a lot of the computer's resources, but THIS is ridiculous! It was like going back to Windows 98 with 256MB RAM. Problem is, I have this*, so it shouldn't be this slow! Should it??? :

*Pavilion a6750y Desktop
AMD Phenom X4 9650 quad core processor
8gigs PC2 6400 DDR2 SDRAM
750 gig SATA Hard Drive (7200 rpm) (with about 650 gigs of space left!)
ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics with 256mb memory
2MB L2 _ 2MB shared L3 Cache memory
Windows Vista Home Premium 64bit

Is there a way I can tweak my memory or ? to make this not happen? Or does my computer have a serious problem?
Thanks for your feedback!

It will be real laggy during it. But it should be fine afterward...

~Lordbob

Thanks for that info. Glad to hear it's "normal" ... but jeez, I can't believe that 8 gigs of ram and a quad processor can't handle the diagnostic program better than this!

Well the point of it is to do that. It tests your systems limits, which is going to create lag. Its how it tests it. It puts a huge load on the CPU, bigger and bigger until it lags. Same with the RAM.

~Lordbob

lordbob75, thank you! Now it makes sense!

Let us know if you are happy to mark this as solved?

Resolved as far as I'm concerned. Thanks!