Im working on a computer for someone its a Dell Dem 8200, P4, 2.0Ghz, 256MB RAM, 120 Western Dig HD. Ok so heres the problem I have installed the new hard drive 120Gig WD HD I have installed win xp pro corp on it. But even when the pc is just sitting idle NO running programs its idleing at 35% CPU usage why is that i cant figure it out?

there's some WXP processes/services running---check Task Manager and Admin Tools>Services?

Check HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and see what's running at boot up.I had a similiar issue a few weeks back with one of my end users, his issue was with a 2 minute 100% utilization. The problem, an application running at start-up that was killing the CPU every 5 minutes. I cleared all unknown reg keys in the run hive and reboot. It worked like a charm. Thing to note, backup registry before attempting this. I would also recommend extracting the key and then deleting one at a time.

I know there are no programs runnings because i just barly installed windows yesterday and all there is other then windows is Office which i just installed and it was running slow before then i have checked msconfig and there is only one thing listed there at startup. and it was this slow when i was installing windows. took like 7 hours or more.

PLZ someone help me im going crazy from the above problem.

we didn't say to check only for programs. check also for processes/services running, which could be running even though WXP was just installed. when you bring up Task Manager, how many processes are running? (note I did NOT ask you to check msconfig for how many apps. are listed to run at startup.) also have you checked if Task Scheduler is trying to run anything?

You said you have a 120GB HD. Do you have too many files? Because one of the services runnnig that often kills cpu is the Index Service.