Have you ever recognized a difference between booting up on a FRESH install and then a few days later an installation with loads of programs on it? That's because your HDD space is being taken up. The more HDD space you take up, the longer it takes for your PC to process the data because there's so much of it. Defrag your hard disks and get rid of any unnecessary data that you don't need. Purchasing a second hard drive (or slave drive) will help as well, especially if it's a 1TB if you do LOTS of recording.
Also shut off Chrome when playing because if you go to Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Escape) you will see how much memory (K) it takes to keep it running and even idling.