I should have mentioned that there is no need to worry about AHCI for the Drives; that is actually a faster method than the old IDE; DMA was a way of getting the most out of IDE, but with SATA, it is not really an issue. Is your disk activity indicator even moving? If not, your fine.
Even with 8 GB memory, it is inadvisable to turn off the page file. The OS will use it to some extent no matter how much memory you have; it will make one on the fly if it has to. Better to set a fixed size, and if you can, put it on another drive or partition. I used to make a 6 - 10GB partition just for the page file. That way it never gets fragmented.
If you get an SDD, put it there. I have the whole OS and a 2048MB page file + samples, etc on a new OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOP 240GB SSD and it flies! (SSD’s have their own issues though - turn off defrag; make sure there is a 1024k offset at the front, etc.)
What about the SIIG Firewire card and drivers?
Did you use that in the old system?
If you did and it worked fine, maybe it is a bandwidth (or IRQ) sharing problem, as I earlier stated. Turning off TH & other unneeded mobo hardware might help. OR:
Try putting it in another PCIe slot (you can even put it in a x16 slot, though it will probably knock your video card speed down to x8, but that might not be anything to worry about - I had to put one of my UAD cards in a x16 slot and my GTX480 is still benchmarking at the Windows maximum).
Is that (the Firewire card) your converter pipeline to the computer? That is a high priority point, and if anything is wrong there, you’re in ‘kludge land.’
If it is a new acquisition (or even if it is the same thing you used in XP/32 bit land), maybe the drivers don’t play nice with Win 7, or the 64 bit environment; you may have to try different drivers, or get a different card. Texas Instruments is the recommended Firewire chip to use. A lot of people have had issues with this in the past and found that their VIA or other Firewire chip was causing a problem.
Incidentally, I’m afraid that Firewire is being phased out. And I just bought a MR816CSX for my laptop! But USB3 and Thunderbolt should cover the new converters, though I like a solid PCI (e) connection when it comes to digital audio I/O.
Cheers
G