Computer issues!!

[lsta5838]

Hi my computer takes for ever to do anything. 5 or more minutes to load up. Sometimes minutes to load a web page. I have attached a photo of what the "CPU" is doing.

Please tell me what I can do to spead the computer up so I do not throw it out my window.

Thanks

[TheBearMay]

Looks like you might be doing a high amount of paging in and out. Other than analyzing what you have running and determining the programs that are memory hogs, the quickest solution may be to throw some more RAM at it...

[David Harrison]

I don't know what you were doing on your PC while that CPU usage was recorded, but if it was just idling, then that CPU usage is far too high.

Have a look at the processes tab, and organise by CPU usage (highest at the top, and please ignore the "System Idle Process"). Also it might also to help to organise by memory usage (again, highest at the top). As a general rule, programs shouldn't really use any CPU time if they aren't doing anything, as for memory, most programs shouldn't ever need more than 100 MB (102400 KB) so anything that's over that (or perhaps approaching it) should be looked at.

It could also be worth while to run a full scan of an anti-spyware and anti-virus program on your computer to remove any nasties that could be lurking. I'd recommend Spybot (http://www.spybot.info/en/index.html) and AVG (http://free.grisoft.com/), both of these are free.

After you've run the scans, if you could post a screen shot of all the processes organised by CPU and memory usage that might help. I would also recommend using the PNG format for these images rather than JPG, and please don't resize the image because it distorts everything. PNGs are very small in size when the images only have a few colours in or have large blocks of colour, JPGs are better for when images have thousands or millions of colours, such as digital camera pictures.

Edit: I've uploaded images of my task manager to show you exactly what I meant in my post. Note that without any image resizing or optimisation, both images easily fit inside the 100 KB attachment file size limit as PNGs.

[lsta5838]

hi thanks both. I think it was because i was running norton antivirus 2005 and windows XP on a computer that is 6 years old (though it does have a 1 gig CPU. I now am running that free antivirus and it is running a lot quicker.