CPU usage always at 100%, PC practically unusable

Hi, I'd appreciate some help.

HP Pavillion, AMD Athlon XP 2400+ processor, 2GB RAM, Vista Home Premium.
The PC is three or four years old.

When I got Vista, I only had 512MB of memory but I was able to run Vista
pretty well even with Aero. I recently upgraded to 2GB RAM, which is
recognized, and the problems seemed to begin shortly after, but I'm not sure
they're related to the ram.

While the PC is idle and after a cold boot, the CPU is now pretty much
always running at 95-100%, while the RAM usage is at about 30%.

I did some digging in the Task Manager and found some things that didn't
look right.

There are no applications running. (Windows) explorer is using about 89MB
of ram while idle, but the Processes tab shows that there are 469,000 page
faults, 1,264 I/O reads, 25 I/O writes and 35,000 I/O other related to
explorer. I have the virtual memory set to let the system decide the size.
I have a 2GB thumb drive running Readyboost at the system designated size.

I know this PC can run Vista. I ran it for about three months without
problems when I had only 512MB RAM. It was a little slow, but it was very
usable. I don't have much software loaded, I only use MS office 2007 (the
2007 trial version now, otherwise 2003), Outlook 2007 and IE7.

The processor is so maxed out that the system is almost unusable. Lots of
freezes and everything runs extremely slowly. I almost couldn't get to this
site to post this.

Please help. Thanks.

 

Hi, Tom.

The first thing that comes to mind when this problem is mentioned is the
Indexing Options. How long since you installed Vista? Indexing is supposed
to run in the background and suspend operations whenever the human wants to
type or otherwise do anything with the computer. But it sometimes slows
things down, anyhow. This behavior usually goes on for just the first few
days after Vista is installed, until the Index is built. Large drives with
many GB of files to search obviously will take longer.

Click Control Panel | Indexing Options and see what it says. If it says
"Indexing speed is reduced due to user activity", then you know that it
hasn't finished building the Index. When it has, this message will say,
"Indexing is complete."

Of course, that might NOT be the problem, but it's the first thing to check.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX

Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail beta in Vista Ultimate x64)

 

Hi RC,

Thank you for your reply.

I checked the Indexing Options and it says, "Indexing Complete."

-Tom

 

In Task Manager/ Processes in the column CPU is there any process indicating
that it is constantly running - it will have a reading "01", you may have to
watch it for a few minute. Select >Processes from all users.
Most of them will show a reading of "00" which indicates they are not
running at the time.
The numerals indicate priority.