At the beginning of the year I build a new computer, and was gaming on it, and the graphics were stunning. Doom 3, Halo, etc. I've been quite busy and unable to play for a while, until today. I went to play a couple different games and they were lagging pretty badly. I also run Seti@home, to compare my new comp to my old one, and it was completing the units in around 3 hrs, then all of a sudden they were taking 48+ hrs. After looking around the task manager I notice that "System" (the os I assume) is taking over 60% of my cpu at all times. I am running a P4 360, so that is a lot. On my old P4 1.3 System doesn't even use 1% of my cpu. I have tinkered with many settings, but cannot find a way to stop it from eating so much of my CPU. As it stands right now, my comp cannot do what I built it to do. Any help would be appreciated, I don't want to reformat.

What OS are you using on the 1.3 system? HAte to break it to you, but windows is just gonna start randomly sucking after a while.. the best thing to do would be get a new operating system (lol just kidding, actually im not but thats kind of drastic). next best thing would be to reinstall but since you dont want to do that look into these things: * a registry cleaner of some sort, which takes out all the JUNK from your registry * ad/mal/spy-ware remover *disk cleaner *disk defragmentor *run "services" from the "administrative tools" in the "control panel" and take out the services you dont need/use often *look into something like "xp lite" (google that) to take the unneeded junk out of xp thats all I can think of. goodluck eskiled www.linuxteens.com

I'm going to suggest the obvious: Viri & spyware...I'd check there first. If you haven't already, d/l the Microsoft/Giant beta spyware killer- run that along w/Adaware & Spybot. T

I ran defrag, adaware, and virus scan. My old computer is runing the same exact OS, and hasn't been reinstalled in 3 years while it has only been installed on this comp for 2 months (XP Home SP1). I also went through the services today, and it didn't help any.

Scan for spyware and viruses, per Tracy. Then maybe look for dust build up in the CPU fan and heatsink. An overheated CPU can run at half-clock and as the temp rises will reduce by another half-clock, on and on. If you leave the computer on all the time, reboot it once in a while. Sometimes a program will cause a memory leak or not fully unload from memory. By the way, SETI would not run properly on my Win XP Pro, so I took it off a while back.