Is this standard performance for an i5-650 processor?

[kevinla]

I was downloading Adobe Acrobat X. It is large file.

While I was doing this, I wanted to surf the internet in Chrome.

I had 12 tabs open in Chrome in addition to a couple other Chrome windows with one tab open.

Surfing the internet and switching between tabs was slow.

I have 4 GB of RAM in Windows 7.

Should there be a slow down in surfing and switching tabs when downloading a large file?

[Pitabred]

With 12 tabs and only 4GB of RAM? Depends on what the sites were, but I've got 3 tabs open and Chrome is taking almost 400MB of RAM as it is.

It depends on what other programs and such you have loaded, but it's entirely possible that it's normal behavior. Open your task manager and look at the Performance tab. If your available and/or Free RAM amounts are low (and look at your commit, see if it's near saturation), you're just running out of memory with that much open.

[Leijonasisu]

Could be quite possible you just had HDD activity or something spiked for the moment or because you don't have much ram.