Thanks Leira, I'll try turning the virus protection off. It's a different one to the one I was using previously which I had no issue with except it taking over my entire system and dragging it down.

Pyro - I never actually thought of that. When I did the install, I removed several partitions from my hard drive that had corrupted, to form one big drive. I haven't gotten around to repartitioning them (don't honestly see the point), so I'll try poking my BiOS back to default and see what that does