RE : Artist 6 to Artist 8 (reinstallation?)

Paul,
A quick observation: Steinberg Forums. Here it shows your RAM being used almost completely, which means that the system is likely using the virtual memory (aka “swapping in/out from a mechanical laptop HDD”). Not good for performance, try to reduce your memory footprint during production.
And I could make the CPU out to be running at .78 GHz, there’s some serious throttling going on there, or so it seems. Quite possibly it will up-clock again under load, but the system shouldn’t really be doing any of this in the first place!
I’d check the BIOS for the possibility of disabling EIST or related power management settings.

Cheers,
Benji