Advise

[Rob J]

Hey yawl,

Got a 3 year old ASUS laptop running Windows XP.

Just lately the laptop's being running increasingly slow and hot!!

I suspect there are lots of programes running in the "background" as even when there's seemingly nothing happening the CPU usage is running at around 90%. The battery is also running down very quickly.

I have run a defrag but that's about all I know what to do when it comes to this kind of thing.

Any ideas how/if I can check what's going on and if possible close down the none essential stuff to get the PC running effectively again?

Thanks in advance.

Regards

Rob

 

[richie]

look for a regedit program... Or alternatively reinstall the whole lot...

I am on a 7 year old Acer still running OK....ish....

 

[sockpuppet]

Uninstall all the program you no longer use
Run a freeware program called CCleaner
Run this from Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/defender/default.mspx

Report back and we'll go from there.

 

[Mav]

Ok, hang on a minute - there is a much simpler way to sort this out (editing the registry risks totally screwing your machine to the point it won't even reboot )

Start the task manager by holding down Ctrl and Alt and Delete, from here you can see which processes are running and how processor they are using. If you do this after starting the up the machine but without starting any apps, that should give you an idea of what is taking all the power. Any processes you don't recognize, google the name of it, and that will confirm if you need it and how you can stop or remove it. For safe removal of programs, use the add/remove utility available from the control panel.

Hope that helps