Friendd of mine asked me to have a look at her laptop, as her wanadoo internet connection kept dropping out.

Just taken a quick look to see how its running anyway - CPU usage is at 100% with no applications running - is this normal for a laptop?

Can't believe it is - its a Toshiba Satellite Pro, with a Celeron 2.2Ghz and 240Mb of RAM, running XP Home.

Any ideas welcomed!!

Whats the processes list look like.

You sure you're not looking at the System Idle Process?

That SHOULD be near as damn it 100%

Friendd of mine asked me to have a look at her laptop' date=' as her wanadoo internet connection kept dropping out.

Just taken a quick look to see how its running anyway - CPU usage is at 100% with no applications running - is this normal for a laptop?

Can't believe it is - its a Toshiba Satellite Pro, with a Celeron 2.2Ghz and 240Mb of RAM, running XP Home.

Any ideas welcomed!![/quote']

Definitely not normal - have a look in Task Manager (right-click task bar) then click the processes tab to see what is using all the CPU, a click on the column headings will sort according to the column name - the Image name column gives the name of the executable which is eating the CPU.

Normally this should be the System Idle Process.

System Idle Process is using the least a tthe mo, 20k. Its running 50 processes, highest being svchost.exe at about 47,000k

Page file usage is currently at 90o-ish mb

System Idle Process is using the least a tthe mo' date=' 20k. Its running 50 processes, highest being svchost.exe at about 47,000k

Page file usage is currently at 90o-ish mb[/quote']

Not too concerned about that column (Mem Usage) check the CPU column it tells you what percentage CPU time is being used...if it is not visible then select View - Select Columns and put a tick in the box for CPU Usage.

SVCHOST.exe is responsible for all the services running on the machine so it's ok that it has pinched a fair portion of memory.

ahhh, sp2update.exe is currently at 99 - wonder if that would be it then!

just checked and its running SP1

could be!

Any one else know how long that should run for - I updated mine from a CD so didn't notice it.

I'm not sure how long she's had that one there - I'm going to need to speak to her and find out!

Its A Virus!

do ya reckon?

spyware

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/startups/Sp2update.exe-6526.html

cheers for that - just checked and found 2 more. any ideas where I can get a spyware removal app?

Look for Spybot on google. It's free.

ATG

ta

You got me looking at my PC, mine says 100% being used.

Then I noticed I have that Folding thing going on.

Saying that, part of the problem could just be the laptop itself...

I used to have (until it died :() a Toshipa Satellite Pro with an AMD K6-2 366mhz processor, 32mb ram and a seperate 4mb for the graphics... only started to run properly on win98 when the ram was upped to the max of 160mb...

...a friend who has a packard bell with a celeron processor, and 192mb ram after the intergrated graphics has been taken out has always complained of a slow laptop that eats battery and gets very hot (due to high processor usage when doing nothing).

Compare that to the 2 dell laptops I'm running now, 1 with 512mb ram, and the other 1gb, and with centrino procesors, where the battery lasts forever and the processor useage sits at 0 - 5%...

So, what am I saying?

The laptop will always run a bit on the slower side due to the processor, and is not helped by not having exactly a lot of RAM. OK the likes of spyware and adware will seriously hamper the performance, but once sorted out, you would be good advising a RAM upgrade to your friend as well, because it will make the machine run so much better!!

Programs worth installing:

Spybot Search & Destroy

Sypware Blaster

Adaware

You can get them from this site