epsxe need help with unknown course of slowdown.

[JefTheReaper]

to keep the story short,
years ago I found a neat program called epsxe, and decided to install it so I could throw out my old ps1 and play my cd's on pc instead,
tried it and failed during configuration,
a year later I tried ones more, being a little smarter I knew how to get past installing the entire thing with pluggins and all, but during start up of the game, it was horribly slow and never responded
years later ones more, I tried again and somehow suceeded in making the game's I liked from a now distant past, run perfectly smooth
my pc crashed months later, I tried to reinstall but I had lost my configuration settings I saved in a notepad due to the crash, and ones more my games ran horribly slow,

here I am now a year later again, I spend over 2 weeks now trying various combinations, read multible posts of various people with the same problems and all failed, as last resort I post here in the hopes somebody out there has the settings/missing link, I need to get my games to run smooth again before I die of old age (laughs)

I use Pete's OpenGL2 Driver 2.9

my current configuration settings dont mater as the game's seem to run equally (if not slightly different) slow, I know what you are thinking "its your graphic card or your pc is to slow"
well I out-ruled that option as a full year ago my pc was well and able to deal with all games I played (digimon world 1, final fantasy 7 - 8 - 9, medieval) with no lag and reasonable settings.
considering my pc has had a lot of updates in that small year with graphic boosts as well, it would be odd that it still runs slow, to be fair I would not be surprised if it would run equally slow on a windows 8 with the newest graphic card on the market.

If anything I am conserned about, what is the best bios file for games like final fantasy? (or does this hold no relevance?)

I don't seek a guide for configurations as I tried pretty much every one out there and came up with a same result each time, ether
1: final fantasy 7 runs slow all the time, final fantasy 8 is so slow it takes 15 minutes to get past the first logo's, final fantasy 9 runs with stutter and goes slow during the moments I am at the world map
2: instant crash saying I am missing some files (looked up what that was about too, no information whatsoever, nor do I really care)

I just want to know, if anybody knows why its running so slow, what I need to add, change or mod at EpsxE itself (as obviously It can't be my pc's fault as it used to run the games smoothly before) please tell me! its really freaking me out how impossible it is to find why and how to solve it, I just want to play the games I never had time to finish when I was a kid, pretty frustrating as even now its not working out.

so I just in a shorter version want to request
1- what pluggins/other aditional files might be missing/incorrectly selected to run epsxe, and witch ones I do need to use to optimize.
2- any other reason for the game's to slow down like this, how to fix it
3- the correct graphic settings for a fast gameplay while still getting it close to the ps1 quality (I remember from a year ago playing the game's, they looked like there origional ps1 quality, only a step or 2 lower, currently my graphics are at least 10 steps lower then the origional but also way slower)
I don't really get how epsxe works as it's beyond my understanding how a full year ago my game's could run at a slight note lower resolution of the original ps1 quality with no lag at all, but now while the game looks truly terrible due to how much the settings are below even average, its still so slow, would it not be logical for it to get faster the lower the graphics are instead of the other way around?