I am running XP with 590 megs of ram, on an athlon 1ghz, and am finding that the cpu usage after a fresh install (and on) will sit at around %30 constantly. After installing windows 2000 pro it sits at %0-1... Are there any hardware issues with AMD and XP? Any ideas what this could be ?

I'm using Xp Home Ed, with a 1.1 Gig athlon and the cpu idles at 4-6% with 12 programs running in the background. And my install is 1 month old.

this is taken from another cp user who had the same prob, this is what i wrote : yeah definately...this involves changing bios settings tho, as the high cpu usage is because yer ram has not been configured properly. i had the same prob and this is what helped me to have 0-2% cpu usage on idle. change yer rams cas latency to 2 (if it doesnt work, then u'll need to clear the cmos to get the machine booting again..and then leave it at cas 3) make sure dram timing is set to SPD fast R-W turnaround is enabled make yer AGP aperture size double to what the MB of yer vid card is..so if you have a 32mb card, make agp aperture size 64.. disable things in the bios you dont need, such as usb if u dont use the ports, or onboard sound or video. make yer dram clock to whatever mhz yer ram isrunning at..ie 66, 100 or 133mhz cpu L2 cache ecc checking - disabled i cant remember anything else at the moment, so please feel free to mail me if this doesnt help

Don't do anything until you hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and check what the CPU usuage of indivudal programs is. I had this problem and I found a prog that was working incorrectly and hogging the CPU..