Hi, My system has been suffering from random lag spikes, while running any program... from something as small as Notepad to something as big as Crysis the game. Even while scrolling pages, the graphics start to lag. And lag in a game always starts after about 5 minutes of playtime. Sometimes, it goes away if I alt+tab. I've noticed that whenever this happens, my CPU Usage shows anywhere between 50-100%. While I initially attributed this to my Creative Audigy sound card, uninstalling the card didn't help. I don't understand what the problem is... can someone help? System Configuration: Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+, MMX, 3DNow, ~2.2GHz Memory: 2048MB RAM 3D Accelerator name: ATI Radeon HD 3850 512 MB

"my CPU Usage shows anywhere between 50-100%" Did you look at the Processes tab in Device Manager to see which program is hogging the CPU?

I did... the odd thing is, no program actually seems to be using more than 40K memory, and that's from Firefox. :/

You should be looking at the percentage in the CPU column, not the Mem Usage

I did. And based on the fact that practically NOTHING seemed to be hogging all the CPU, I posted the original message.

"And based on the fact that practically NOTHING seemed to be hogging all the CPU" Next time it happens, immediately bring up Task Manager > Processes & click on the word "CPU" at the top of the column. This will sort the proccesses according to CPU usage (you may have to click it twice to bring the "users" to the top). Other than that, have you scanned for viruses, spyware, checked the MSCONFIG list? http://netsquirrel.com/msconfig/msc...

Its only the System Idle Process, its always at 99... i'm guessing that's fine. And yes, I've checked msconfig. Nothing wrong there.