Downloaded the process explorer, but I don't really know what I'm looking for. Any hints as to what all the gobbledy-gook means? It says that system idle is using about 95% of the CPU? Does that make sense?
'Shindig'
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Nope, That's way too high. My XP box is jumping between 0-8% and that's with Azureus, ICQ, MuM, InCD, WordWeb, AsusProbe, and Opera running.
Strike that, I misread the post. What OS are you using, SailAweigh?
I just did a quick test, launching Word used 5% of my system resources, but opening a relatively small document briefly required 51%.
SailAweigh, I was getting some stuff like that when there was some spyware on my computer. Have you tried running SpyBot and AdAware to see if they catch anything?
The number in the "CPU" column in the "system idle" row is the percentage you have to spare. Higher is better.
Each line in the display that shows a number in the CPU column is a program that is using CPU cycles.
Haven't run AdAware for a week or more. Might have picked something up. I think I'll try that.
"system idle" row is the percentage you have to spare
Then I should have plenty to spare, but it sure doesn't act like it.
ETA: jimi, I use Windows ME.
Windows' "System Performance" figure is based on more than just CPU use, but I don't know the details.
I can help translate some of the "gobbledy-gook" in Process Explorer if you like, but that's probably best done with IM.
dcp, I think I'm too brain dead to talk coherently about this right now. I ran AdAware, there was only 4 files to get rid of (I'd emptied my internet cache earlier to see if that helped.) One interesting thing, you can pull up a view of the "system information." It says I've got a total of 130,256k (128M) of physical memory (which is right), but that only around 3M is actually available. Now, that just does not sound right. But I can't see any processes running that are taking up massive memory!
One other suggestion then, tomorrow you might run "msconfig" and have a look at what programs are being loaded at start-up.