All of the CPU usage figures that have been given indicate a healthy and non-seriously (at worst) 'infected' machine. Congrats !

Two other points in addition to the comments of LotR...

Windows (true for numerous iterations) sometimes does weirdness re: certain defaults... And OFTEN performs blatant stupidities as deemed proper by Micro$haft...

One of these little items of enormous importance is the portion of your Hard Disc Drive allocated to Paging File (or, what used to be known in a slightly saner world as Virtual Memory).

Set your 'Paging File' to

384MB Minimum

768MB Maximum

(Who knows, it may already be set that way ! Miracles happen, huh ?)


The other is a very common madness out there that is definitely a stupidity from Micro$haft...

The Temporary Internet Files setting is almost always set to an absurdly large number...

Set it to 80MB.

Doing these simple steps AND defragmenting your HDD frequently will usually have a very positive impact on overall performance.

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A last question/thought for now...
Are you possibly having any of the above problems WHILE there is a CD (of any type) in one of your drives ?