How much RAM memory? Try Ctrl+Alt+Delete to select Task Manager and
click the Performance Tab. What is the Total, the Commit Charge and the
Peak?

You may check on pagefile (virtual memory) usage with Page File Monitor for
XP:
http://www.dougknox.com/

If you get anything much more than 20 / 30 mb virtual memory usage you
need to add RAM memory. The system uses virtual memory for a
limited number of tasks rather than RAM memory.

How large is your hard drive? Is it partitioned? How much free space on
each drive / partition. How is the drive formatted -FAT32 or NTFS. To
get this information whilst in Windows Explorer place the cursor on each
drive in turn, right click and select Properties.

What process is generating high CPU usage?

Task Manager is useful but you could look at another freeware utility
Process Explorer, which provides similar information but adds that
little bit extra towards seeing what the running processes represent.

For further information about Process Explorer see here:
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/fr.../procexp.shtml

To ascertain which service is causing the problem select the
process producing the high CPU usage, right click,
select Properties, Services. Note there are the full names and some
explanation of what each service does.

You will find further information on Services here:
http://majorgeeks.com/page.php?id=12

To trace the particular Service involved you need to turn off each
service in turn and then restore it noting what effect it has on CPU
usage. However, you need to take care and watch what other Services are
dependent on that service. When you click on the Dependencies tab allow
it a little time to display the information.


--

Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England

Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



"lost2ny" <lost2ny@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1136486329.038814.262990@g44g2000cwa.googlegr oups.com...
> The performance on my Dell Latitute laptop has degraded to the point of
> absurdity. Programs take extremely long times to load or switch, and my
> drive light flickers constantly. I've uninstalled all unneccissary
> programs. I've gone in to MSConfig and disabled all unneccissary
> startup programs and services. I've run complete system scans with
> Norton Antivirus, Ad-Aware and Spybot (Spybot found a few things the
> first run through, but it's clean now). I've used Norton System Works
> and Abexo to clean and repair any defects in my registry. I've
> defragmented my drive and my registry.
>
> The most puzzling thing, to me is that although my task manager
> indicates that Idle Processes CPU usage is hovering around 90%, yet my
> total CPU usage is hovering at around 50%! Shouldn't the total CPU
> usage be roughly 100 minus the Idle Proccesses CPU?
>
> This is really driving me crazy, but I'm loath to reinstall Windows -
> there should be some way to trace the problem.
>