Help with CPU usage pls!

try hijackthis and see what you have running on boot-up and msconfig

auto updates turned off

also have you got system restore turned on etc

Have a look at the Task Manager and see what processes are running.

Could it be you have toop many secuity products running and they are all conflicting with each other.

You have listed some, but you may have Windows Defender as well.

Also, if your computer is low on memory you could be doing a lot of swapping (moving data from real memory out to disk (virtual memory) to free up real memory, then moving it back in to real memory when it needs it).

Constant swapping like this is called thrashing and if the computer is constanly swapping it often cant get any other work done.

a good start would be to use a process viewer and see whats actually running

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb896645.aspx

The fact you have mcafee installed could be a big clue!

that and you are running on 1gb of Ram, I would drop Mcafee and use something less consuming like AVAST

have a look at task manager and tell us what processes are eating your CPU

Its almost certainly the 1GB ram - McAfee combo. McAfee will scan a programs binary on startup resulting in a 100% CPU use for a period of time, 1GB is scarcely enough for XP-SP3+McAfee so you will be doing a lot of paging. You've probably also got lots of background apps each using a small amount of CPU and not-insignificant amount of RAM which will hurt when you only have 1GB to play with.

Thanks for the responses. I got it wrong about the McAfee. I actually have CA's eTrust running on the machine. Checked all the processes and nothing is out of the ordinary. At one point, PointSec was running, which was caning it. I disabled it. It seemed fine for a few hours, but then went back to its old ways.

Yes, system restore is turned on. No, Windows Defender isn't running.

Is there any way to find out if swapping is taking place?

Whats your memory usage on task manager? That will give you an idea...

When I'm running it idle, it's usually Explorer that eats the CPU. When I run a browser, it takes over the CPU hogging. At times, svchost tanks it.

the page file graph under performance on task manager. if it is peaking a lot then you're thrashing the swap file and need to upgrade your ram

It's between 400 to 500 MB.

i've tried a few different things and i can't get my svchost to hit close to that kind of cpu usage, mine flits between 0 and 1%

are you using a USB modem of some kind? or umm, I don't know. have you tried running malware bytes, or some others in case you have a trojan hiding somewhere.

if you're connected to a router via wired or wireless networking try updating the drivers.