As of last night I have not had any problems with my PC. I did a clean install of windows about 5 weeks ago and it has been running wonderfully since then. Today, I was having problems with music and video playing very choppy. This was both streaming internet as well as music on my hard drive. Internet page loads have been slow and typing in a word document would occasionally have a hiccup as well. Tonight when I tried to stream a tv show on the internet (the same thing I did last night without a single hiccup) the video was choppy, the pc would freeze at times and then catch up again. When I opened task manager I found that my CPU usage was at 100% and staying steadily there. I have not added any software or hardware. I haven't even deleted anything. I've not done anything today that I haven't done in the past 5 weeks without a problem. Suddenly my cpu is maxed out all of the time for some reason I can't understand. I don't have any programs running when it is doing that either. I've tried restarting and it just works it's way back up to 100% again. Any guesses as to what's going on? If this weren't a clean install of windows that has been running properly for so long, I might could understand, but this I don't get. I've also run adaware and spotbot and supposedly cleared out problems, so I'm lost. Help, please.

In the task manager what processes are significantly using memory and CPU?

System Idle Process is using 90+ percent. There is minor usage from the remainder.

Surely this means your CPU is 90% idle, not being used? Ridgewayranger

My 1st question is, why did you do a clean install of Windows? Generally, that indicates there was a problem. Most people don't go thru the hassle of formatting, reinstalling the OS, drivers, updates & programs without good reason.

There was no problem. It was easier than trying to uninstall all of the old drivers, no longer used programs etc. It's what I call Windows rot. It just starts wasting your hard drive. It was only a couple of hours worth of "hassle" and not really a "hassle". My cpu never had a problem before the reinstall and never had one since until yesterday, so that wasn't the problem...