Slow running

[~~Tides~~]

Dunno what's going on with the laptop just now, but its running really slowly. When I go on to task manager and look at the performance tab, the CPU usage is fluctuating wildly between 35% and 70%, averaging at about 55%. This shouldn't be right surely? Especially when there are just a couple of I.E. windows open in the back ground.

This is the new laptop, that given the whole dual core, 64 bit processor malarky, I was expecting great things, but the speed has actaully been pretty dissappoing. It's a country mile per hour slower than the ol' desktop.

Any suggestions appreciated as always.

[blueivy]

Dunno what's going on with the laptop just now, but its running really slowly. When I go on to task manager and look at the performance tab, the CPU usage is fluctuating wildly between 35% and 70%, averaging at about 55%. This shouldn't be right surely? Especially when there are just a couple of I.E. windows open in the back ground.

This is the new laptop, that given the whole dual core, 64 bit processor malarky, I was expecting great things, but the speed has actaully been pretty dissappoing. It's a country mile per hour slower than the ol' desktop.

Any suggestions appreciated as always.

What process(es) is/are taking up the 35% to 70% CPU? Is this XP or Vista? Is the hard drive light flashing away just as wildly?

It could be a thousand different things that are happening to your laptop just now. The vast majority of them are pretty normal things, especially for a new machine. One that springs to mind is Windows Update patches.

[~~Tides~~]

Its at about 20% now. Its XP, I didnt look at the hard disc light, so I dont know. As I said, just a couple of webpages in the background. But there are tons of things in the processes tab bit. It says iexplore.exe is using 175,968 K of memory though, this sounds a bit high, no?

[blueivy]

Its at about 20% now. Its XP, I didnt look at the hard disc light, so I dont know. As I said, just a couple of webpages in the background. But there are tons of things in the processes tab bit. It says iexplore.exe is using 175,968 K of memory though, this sounds a bit high, no?

It may only be a couple of webpages that you can see, but your computers runs dozens of tasks in the background that could be doing something.

If you go into Task Manager (when it's busy) and sort the processes by the CPU column (by click on the column heading) it will tell you, albeit briefly, what process is using what percentage CPU.

I tend not to use IE, but I started it here and with a blank page it was taking up 35Mb - I opened 4 pages and it's showing now 59Mb. 175Mb seems high, however it again depends what page it's showing, what plugins you have and many other things.

[Riffman]

What processes are you running?

Can you take a screen shot of the task manager process tab?

You might have a virus or spyware sneaking in there.

[~~Tides~~]

It must just be the IE, cos once those windows were closed, everything went back to 1%. Still cant understand why its using so much power...

[Mr_Me19]

If it was a flash game or another embedded application this can suck up a lot of processing power.