What is going on with my PC?

Hi.
I am running an Athlon 2400 with 512MB of ram and XP home, and to be frank its a bit of a pain in the @^$£. Thew CPU seems to be running at 100% whenever I try and do pretty much anything, and It makes everything, like watching a movie or even going online a chore.

Whenever it does something like this I press the microsoft magic key combination (ctrl alt Del) and quite often find that the cpu usage indicator is reading 100%. This is usually a few processes using up more of the processor speed than they should, but I have recently noticed that the cpu can be running at around 60-75% and the process list says that the system idle process is running at 90-99%. This can continue for ages sometimes and usually results in me getting annoyed swearing very loudly and restarting.

This may not make much sense from my descriptions, but next time I catch the little B@$+@^|) at it I will take some screen shots and post them on this thread.

 

I would follow these instructions to tweak your system for performance, and lower resource consumption. Pay particular attention to the steps in the malware thread, as usually when the problem you describe occurs, it is due to malware, or a failed application.

Good luck!

 

These 2 programs will enable you to get control over what starts up and what runs on your PC.

Process Explorer. http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4566