Hello everyone, My computer has recently been acting very oddly. It takes forever to start up and when I go to task manager its always at 100% cpu usage EVEN when im not doing anything. It takes forever to open even internet explorer or any of the folders on my hard drive. Any help would be much appreciated. THanks

another thing that I noticed is that when first turning on the computer the screen where it says the copyright info and has the xp logo sometimes blinks and the little green bar sometimes freezes up a little. The bar used to freeze up but the screen never used to blink. Im not sure if this means anything.... THanks

do some maintenance routines designed to ease the load on your computer; 1. run Chkdsk and Defrag. 2. Run AdAware; http://www.lavasoftusa.com/index.html 3. make a visit to Housecall; http://housecall.antivirus.com 4. Run Regcleaner; http://www.vtoy.fi/jv16/index.shtml 5. stop unecessary services from running; click Start, Run, type: services.msc then right-click and disable the following: Alerter Clipbook Computer Browser Fast User Switching Human Interface Access Devices Indexing Service (it slows the hard drive down) Messenger (allows misuse of Alerter) Net Logon (unnecessary unless networked on a Domain) Netmeeting Remote Desktop Sharing (disabled for extra security) Remote Desktop Help Session Manager (disabled for extra security) Remote Procedure Call Locator Remote Registry (disabled for extra security) Routing & Remote Access (disabled for extra security) Server SSDP Discovery Service (this leaves TCP Port 5000 wide open) TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper Telnet (disabled for extra security) Universal Plug and Play Device Host Upload Manager Windows Time Wireless Zero Configuration (for wireless networks) Workstation [Attribution: http://pcbuyersguide.com/software/system/WinXP-Tips.html] more details on these services at: http://rogier.xszone.nl/windows/xpservices.html and at: http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/tsgeninfo.nsf/docid/2002010712042239 6. download X-Cleaner to a diskette and run it once a week: http://www.xblock.com/cgi-bin/download.pl/-13232-/xcleaner_free.exe let us know what worked for you...