I am not sure what is going on, but I shoot up to using 100% of my cpu for doing simple things such as opening the task manager, or even using a simple program like photoshop (don't even get me started on the slow down of more CPU intensive programs such as computer animation software.) Not only is it shooting up to 100%, but it is a red bar...not green. I really am lost because I have a 1.1ghz processor with 512mbs of ram, and hardly anything running in the background. I have tried doing it with no programs running in the background and it doesn't make a bit of difference. This really shouldn't be happening. I am using Windows 2000. Please any help is greatly appreciated...this is really starting to bother me. Thanks in advance, Leif

Have you checked for viruses? Have you checked Administrative Tools -> Event viewer for problems? Have you checked your performance options? You should preferably let Windows set this up. You can, however, choose your fastest drive for this pagefile.sys. It should be 766 MB in size (1,5 times your physical mem) for 512 MB. I also have 512 MB on a P3-500 ant it works lightning fast. Please check your diskspace, too. Hope this will help, Harold

Have you checked your hard drive space? the more h/d space you have , the faster speed you got. It's supposed to have at least 10% of your h/d.

Yeah...I have well over 10gbs of free space.

Try defrag.