My computer is running extremely slowly much of the time. According to the Windows Task Manager, it is using 80% of the CPU sometimes to do nothing. I regularly run AVG to check for viruses but it hasn't found one. The machine is running XP and has 1GB of memory.
Gerry Brady
Windows XP is somewhat prone to "runaway processes" that consume most or all of the processor time, and unlike Vista and Windows 7, XP doesn't provide much in the way of performance monitoring. However, with Windows Task Manager or the free Process Explorer, you can see which process is consuming the CPU, select it, and end it.
If it's not a process you recognise, look it up at Answers That Work. It might be a bad driver, in which case you can download a new version to replace it. It might be a startup program that you don't need, in which case you can stop it from loading using Mike Lin's simple Startup Control Panel.
One reason for switching to Internet Explorer 8 is that you can run different tabs as different processes. This means you can terminate the runaway thread without losing other tabs you have loaded, but this approach does consume more memory, and opening lots of tabs in IE8 can eat up half a gigabyte.
