I have a p3/600mhz running 384 megs of ram and I had to jigger around some settings to get it smoothed out. It still has its moments when it appears to be daydreaming, but those don't last long and are not too often. You have to remember the p3 came out before xp was some stoned out persons nightmare. Just drop what you can live without from the startup(msconfig>startup) and just tinker with settings till you get somewhere close to what you want. Oh by the way I did discover that if your hard drive can support dma or umda that it really zips on if these settings are turned on. My drives are set up for udma mode 5 and it makes a difference.

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Hi Hooner Now a thought just occured to me(no, It didn't hurt). Go to the maker of the mobo web site and see if the ram configuration is what is reccomended. Check the ram clock speed. Run something like Adia32 to see what the ram card speed is. Match that to the motherboard ram speed. I had one mismatched ram card and it gave me fits. All pc 100 or all pc 133. Large ram cards first then the smaller one last. Hope that helps.

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Ia agree. I can and do use XP on PII class processors still. I wouldn't use it on a PI but if there is enough ram (>128MB) you should be fine. I would note that PIII and low end PIV are pretty cheap these days so to improve performance you may want to upgrade this. Most PIII's are pretty easy to swap out. I'm wondering what is using 100% of your CPU...something is running for sure. J.

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128 Mb of RAM is insufficient to run XP. You need at least 256 Mb

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Press ctrl-alt-del just once. A box opens that allows you end a running program. It also allows you to look at running processes and kill them. Click on the tab> processes. From there observe which process is using the most cpu percentage. Before you kill anything find out what it is and what it does then make a desition as to what a good course of action would be.

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SullyD, Note I said >128MB...but in argument yes you can. I have one machine with 128MB running SP1 no problem. But I don't use it either. In fairness you need a lot of memory to 'decently use XP'. But it works. J.

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J, Sorry, I didn't see the ">" Of course, 128Mb is the *bare minimum* requirements for xp... You should include that in your advice.....no? SullyD

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Yes, I have the same problem still since last friday (it seems most of the people got it then). I tried everything I could and talked to people that are familiar with this sort of problem and they did not know what to do. I am hoping somebody has an idea so I do not have to resort to formatting the HD. We are having a more updated discussion on this topic on this link of the same site: http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/94952.html

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