CPU maxes out during the most simple of tasks

Byron172Byron172 Adelaide, South Australia Member
edited March 2009 in Hardware
I am trying to help one of my colleagues whose PC has been going quite slow for as long as she can remember. Her HDD was virtually full so I have upgraded her from and old 40GB to 160GB thinking that could have been the problem. However now that is done and her PC is still very slow I have looked a little deeper to find that her CPU is maxing out while doing quite simple tasks (ie surfing the net, receiving email etc).
She has 512mb of ram and 1.7ghz CPU - she is using XP SP3 with all updates installed. I figured these spec (whilst no great shakes) would be fine for her day to day needs.
Firstly - will installing extra RAM release some of the workload from the CPU and secondly, does anyone have any suggestions as to what else I could do to relieve the strain on her processor. I should add that this happens even with no other processes running in the background - and I have turned off her background applications one by one to see if any one in particular was to blame - but no cigar........any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Comments

  • CallredCallred Maryville, tn
    edited March 2009
    Yes, more ram will help, but go to RUN: and type MSCONFIG, choose the Startup tab and see how many things are loading at start up and just what they are. I'm actually sitting by a friend's computer that he brought in yesterday with about the same issue.

    Running Task Manager also showed about 57 porcesses at start up. Today, 33 and the CPU load is idling just fine. I took him from 512 megs of ram to a gig I had laying around, stripped the system of un-needed start up items and removed some software he didn't even need.

    Yesterday he had 45 megs of available memory after system start, today well over 580 megs left and the computer is doing just fine. Be sure to see just what is running in MSCONFIG though, sometimes you catch some nasty little things in there too and they won't go away on restart...
  • SoundySoundy Pitt Meadows, BC
    edited March 2009
    When you upgraded the drive, did you also defrag it? A good defragging tool like Diskeeper will do a better job than the built-in XP defragger.

    Also, try running a spyware scan - I personally like Spybot - Search & Destroy; it has a built-in Startup List utility that will give you more information than MSCONFIG, highlighting known bad processes in red.
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited March 2009
    Bringing her up to 2GB of memory is going to be a big help. That should be your target. 512MB, or even 1GB is a crime on any modern OS (yes, even desktop Linux).

    Secondly, she should have no more than about 30 tasks in the task manager at startup. Does she have more than that? ctrl+alt+del to find out.
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