Hi Paul,
If you wnat to shut down some of your unneeded programs you can disable program you dont want running during the day.
Go to run, type in msconfig(short for microsoft configuration, I assume), enter, and click on start up. These are all the programs that are opened, or turned on, when the machine is started up. I did this on my own new pc last week and found there wasn't a single program that needed to be running at startup, but you decide. So I unchecked them all and no programs get started when I boot up. Make sure when you go through the steps they are permanently left off(you can always change them later, if you like).
Next go to a site called tweakxp.com. On the left side click on system performance, and go through this entire list, and see if any of these suggested performance boosters seem applicable to your set up. This will take some time, but I think you'll be amazed at the many services and adjustments that are present that are unnecessary, and keep your pc on the overwhelmed side. I think SERVICES is probably the most important category in this long list. I printed out the list and made a record of the changes I made. To give you an idea of what the two steps described above accomplished, my memory usage(bringing up 3 charts and my brokerage firm) went from around 280MB down to around 150MB. The number of processes went from around 38 down to about 21. Cpu usage dropped as well. You never know when some thing running in the background might cause some sort of unhealthy conflict.
Another thing, which you may have done already, is study the processes to see which might be using up the cpu. Identify the culprit, and then google that process to make sure there is not a virus or trojan or some such evil thing going by the same name as the legitimate process. It is not always easy to tell the genuine process from an invader, but there are sites that will help you.
Two other things come to mind. The first is to start the PC in "safe mode with networking." Usually pressing the f8 key repeatedly during the startup process will bring this up. You may have to start up from a completely turned off machine, not just restarted. This puts the PC in the most basic state possible while still being able to function. See if you can bring up the offending programs(not all programs can be run in safe mode, for instance my charting program will not). And see if you are still getting the high cpu usage. If everything works fine, note the processes running, and compare them to the processes running when the problem exists. This may help you to identify the culprit.
The other suggestion, which I have not done yet, as I only learned of it a few days ago, is to start up the machine in diagnostic mode. This is similar to safe mode, in that you start out in a very basic configuration, but you can apparently add programs or services one by one in such a way that it should be easy to determine when the culprit is added. I don't know the details, but you should be able to learn about it by googling "xp diagnostic start up," or something like that.
The last thing I might mention is that apparently driver conflicts can cause high cpu usage. I even learned of a printer driver recently causing someone high cpu usage. So if it everything is fine in safe mode, that might indicate a driver conflict of some type. The way I isolated my problem recently, which I'll find out if I've fixed in the next day or so, is that I noticed that when I minimized the screens the cpu usaged dropped down to about 0 - 10%, which is where is should be. With the problem going away when the charts were taken off the screen(the information was still being processed, I just couldn't see it), this seemed to indicate a video driver issue, possibly a conflict between different drivers. I have since learned that when you "uninstall" video drivers often there are parts that remain, or they may automatically reinstall themselves, so that a driver or its remnants can cause issues. I will run drivercleaner, a program that removes drivers completely, and then install the Matrox driver, and see if the problem is solved. I am not a PC wizard like many of the guys found on this site, but hopefully this info will help get you started towards finding a solution. Let me know how it goes, or if you need any more help.
doing this helped my alot I suggest doing if or atleast seeing was is running that does not need to run.
unfortunately for me the new box runs Vista and my comp booms me out everyother day or so. I and still trying to resolves this. I f you have any rec let me know I run TS8.3 only and a few web pages on my new comp.
hope this help you out and many others
