CPU usage at 100%?

[RKeaton]

Hey guys

Dunno much about computers...

I have a one year-old PC with a dual-core Athlon processor, 2 gigs of RAM and running XP. It's always been pretty fast and dependable. I guess I got hit with spyware or something, I don't know, but recently my system has slowed to a halt. I opened my task manager today and looked at the Performance tab, it showed my cpu usage was hovering right around 98-100%. I guess that it explains why it takes forever to do anything, even open a browser window.

Lately I've been booting it up in Safe Mode just to be able to use the thing. It works fast and fine in Safe Mode but I guess I can't use all devices/programs, etc. I noticed I have no sound, for example. I've run a few different spyware programs several times (spybot, avast, adaware). They found and deleted some infected files but that hasn't fixed the problem.

So I have basically no idea what to do. Can anybody help?

Thanks...



Rob

 

[Raffaz]

Open task manager and look in the processes tab. What processes are high?

 

[RKeaton]

When you say "high" do you mean which ones are using the most memory? I will have to reboot in normal mode to check that. I do know that there are about 55-60 processes running. That seems high to me (I don't really have any idea what processes are though . But I'm pretty sure there were that many running even in the past when the computer worked fine.

 

[Raffaz]

If you look in the CPU column for the highest number there, ignore system idle process if thats high.

 

[SirMille1]

Try security task manager, it'll tell you if the process is good or bad, or just badly written.