When I view a page with a lot of animations or an advertisement comes up on my "my yahoo" page that is intensive my cpu usuage will go over very rapidly, reaching 100% and causing me to have to shut down if I dont click off the page. I have done a clean install of windows professional to see if this would fix it, but it didn't help. I have 512 mb of ram and a 1 ghz pentium processor. I am currently running xp pro. The task manager states that "system" is using the cpu when this occurs and it only happens when an intense graphic comes on a web page using internet explorer. Does anyone have any suggestions on what this could be or how to fix it? Thanks

Have you tried geting all the new updates for XP including SP1

I have the updates for both xp and internet explorer installed.

Are you usimg an "onboard" graphic card? Most of the Graphic cards built in the motherboard share the CPU's processing resources and the main systems RAM. A high resoulution graphic can really overload the CPU as Windows itself needs a lot of resources to run, as well as any other program you may have running at the time. (Browser, etc.) If this is the case, get yourself a good Video card with it's own Processor and RAM (64MB Min) and you'll really see a difference. There may also be a setting in your system BIOS that allows adjustment to how much CPU resources the video card can use. If there is, you should set it so that the operating system controls this. Hope this helps!

Musky, Do you know how I can get into the bios to figure this out? Is there any way to get into bios from the desktop or do I have to do it when I startup the computer? I just don't understand why it would start doing this, it has worked fine before. That is why I did the clean install. I thought somehow the system had gotten messed up. Thanks for your help.

You didn't mention in your first post that it had "been working fine before". That makes a big difference. Now it does sound like a driver problem. To get into your BIOS, you'll need to access it at bootup. Probably by continually pressing "delete" as the computer is performing the P.O.S.T. I hope you find a setting in there to help you, but if it did just start, I'd try and find the latest drivers from the manufacturer.

Musty There was hardly any options at all in my bios. There was definitly nothing there that had anything to do with changing settings for memory. One last question, what drivers should I attempt to find? Should I look for new drivers for my video card only or is there any other drivers I should look for? Thank you very much. Shawn