[Sir Biscuit]

My dad has been having some trouble with his computer lately. He is running XP, and it often runs at 100% capacity. We have run virus scans, but have turned up nothing. There has been one mention of the power reg. causing this problem in our searches, but we could find no solution.

Is there anything we can do besides reinstalling windows?

[Mak213]

How to keep WinXP really fast & stable

It is a sticky right at the top of the forum.

[Sir Biscuit]

Me = fail. Sorry bout that, folks.

[shdwsclan]

You have have a bit more knowledge on what he is running and how powerful his system is.

There are always services and programs running in the background, you just have to know what you have.

Diskeeper running on full auto will degrade system performance as it defragments the system during idle.

Norton likes to scan inconsiderately.
Most people upgrade to symantec enterprise.

In newer XP version, you do not need an external firewall, windows does a pretty good job of defending itself using its internal firewall, especially if your behind a router.

There may be other software such as automatic update doing some useless junk in the background.

Check task manager for the processes that are heavy in processing and heavy in memory consumption. If you dont need them, or are one of the processes i mentioned, you can disable them in either

services.msc
or
msconfig

Not all the services in msconfig are the same as in serives.msc.
Dont disable anything you will need, especially plug-n-play.

[Mak213]

Did you even read the topic? It covers more than just simple things like Norton and little things like that. Plus you dont have to know specifics to follow those suggestions. You could use them on any machine froma $200 Wal-Mart Special to a $5,000 gaming Rig. It was created by some of the finest minds to use XP. Dotn bash it till you actually read it.