I am running excel to do some extensive data processing and I find that the cpu is running at around 55% capacity. Is there any way of prioritising the system to increase the cpu usage - I am assuming that my data processing will then fun faster. Thanks, Astrikor

You are working under an incorrect assumption. If the CPU is running at 55% than that because that is all the work it has to do. There is spare capacity and there is nothing you can do to use it if the CPU has to wait for data to process. It can only process data that is given to it. In almost all computers the CPU spends most of its time doing nothing just waiting for other things like memory and hard disks to catch up. If you want to speed things up you need to be looking at memory and hard disk performance. Stuart

http://support.microsoft.com/defaul... Computer Speed and Performance May Decrease When you open, then close programs, programs may not free up RAM memory. That is called "Memory Leak". Restarting computer will clear out its RAM memory.

You setup a performance monitor log to determine how to improve speed. There are plenty of web pages on how to speed up xp also that tend to help most situations. You could set proccess to real time but it may cause some issues. Most times it is not the processor, rather the disk access. Make a ram drive if possible to correct that or use faster access to drives. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10