As i force quit another application...

Unless it's spiking, that seems kinda high. If it jumps up to ~50% then back down to ~1%, it's probably just updating something in the background. If it's consistently that high, check the processes to make sure something weird isn't going on. What does the PF usage say? If it's higher than ~500MB, that could be your answer (running out of memory). Try a reboot too, if nothing else works.

Passante said:

and half a meg of ram.

Click to expand...

your running a p4 with half a meg of ram??
haha, upgrade to 640k, according to bill, that ought to be enough for anyone

on a serious note, that doesn't sound quite normal, only thing i can think of is checking msconfig to see if there is tons of stuff loading on startup that you don't know about causing it to lag.

you might just need more ram, but i doubt that, i only have 768MB in my pc which is a good deal slower then 2.8, yet i run usually around 30 tabs in firefox, iTunes, thunderbird, aim, and usually some other stuff all at once and i don't have any problem.

That means that a lot of your RAM is being used. PF = Paging File. Go into the System Properties, Advanced, Performance Settings, Advanced, Virtual Memory Change, and set it to 512 and 512, then click Set. Restart, see if it's still going slow. Then try to run Disk Defrag tonight, see if it helps. That's probably not your problem, but the restart may help and the Defrag will speed things up a bit if your system is fragmented. Run it twice.

Sometimes this is because of malware loading at startup, you can always check your stuff with adaware.

Why don't you just do the 3 finger salute and see what process(es) are eating up the CPU cycles?