*sigh* I hate my PC

[chief]

Falls(from airplane) Do you have real player installed ? If yes, shut if off it runs in the background and it is also a memory hog. In fact have you shut off everything running in the background on startup, except Explorer and Systray ? Then check out system operation, if good, bring on items one at a time till culprit shows up. If you've done all off the above my apologies.

[Wallenstein]

How do I change my BIOS setup for a PCI device?

My friend told me my latency may need to be turned down

he said a high one can bottle information in my system and cause slow down

But he didnt tell me where to go to change it...anyone know?

Well, let´s think it over again. You said your system was running fine until you changed your harddrive. This means after the hd change you or someone else had to install Windows XP again. I suppose that was accomplished with your OS recovery CD that came with your laptop.
After that you should have a clean Windows XP install on your notebook just as if you booted it up for the first time out of the box.
I say your laptop should be in a perfect condition at that point.
A laptop usually is a fully tested and configured system, it´s not a random desktop machine where mainboard A doesn´t like a video card from manfacturer Y together with a driver from christmas 1995.
Talking about BIOS and PCI devices:
In your laptop you don´t have any PCI slots and therefore no PCI devices installed. Accessing a laptop´s BIOS is merely necessary. Why? Because usually you don´t change much of your hardware configuration, there´s nothing to tweak or correct, and all important BIOS values have been set by the manufacturer. If you insist to dive into your BIOS, you have to look into your manual, because the way to access a laptop BIOS depends on the manufacturer.
To come to an end I would do the following:

1. Format your system and do a new clean Windows installation. Optional install DirectX 9 as well.
2. Now install the games that refuse to run properly now. If they don´t work right,
3. get new video drivers and install them.
4. Repeat point 2.

If that doesn´t help I would contact a person with some real knowledge. Right now you only seem to get some more or less useful advice from every corner of the world...and you don´t seem to be too sure what to do with it...
What´s left to say?
Good luck, it will be fine at last!