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I have a dell dimension 4600 with 1g ram winxp pro IE8. I have been getting 100% cpu usage alot recently and I have to restart to clear it.

I have been all over the internet looking for a solution and found the results lacking. Can anyone here help?

You're a little short of explanation of what you
have done to help yourself.

Did you run Malware Bytes or SpyBot software? Do you have antivirus software and not Norton Bloatware?

Have you looked at the task manager to see what is using CPU cycles?

Download this: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

It is essentially a task manager on steroids. It shows more detail than the XP Task Manager provides. It might help you track down the errant process that is using all of the cpu cycles.

You said you are running Internet Explorer 8 with 1 GB of RAM. That is your problem. Add memory. When you run out of physical memory, the system starts switching information back and forth between memory and the hard disk. That is very CPU intensive.

You can confirm this by looking at your Task Manager. Does Commit Charge-Total exceed Physical Memory-Total?

Yes, nothing unusual there as well.

1.5g ram & my commit charge-392950 does not exceed physical memory total-1571824 available-910600 cache-827700.

Butch, thats not quite accurate. All XP systems use virtual memory constantly regardless of the amount of RAM installed. The page file is constantly being used for "least used pages". A pentium 4 with 1 gig of ram will run XP just fine. IPK, when you open your task manager by hitting ctrl-alt-delete, go to the processes tab and click on the CPU heading. This will organize the items based on the percentage of CPU used. Now you should see which service or program is using up the most cycles. Reply with the program name and we can troubleshooot further.

I have to agree. 1 gig of ram is plenty, especially if you allow XP to have a pagefile. Lots of people have more RAM, or want more, but an XP machine just sitting idle is not going to use 100% processor time to page... More like zero percent.

Next step: do exactly what Tito said, so you can identify the offending program or service. If it turns out to be svchost.exe, then your machine is probably "owned."

BTW [slightly off-topic], I have an XP box with 2 gigs, and have the page file turned off completely. Paging is for the birds...

Jim
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Speaking from a secure undisclosed location.

I have seen instances where a AV update caused the AV engine to throttle the CPU cycle to 100% (seen with both mcafee, and trendmicro but that's not to say others couldn't do it)

you could try stopping your AV (assuming there is one) if that's it, your CPU cycles should drop like a stone though depending on how responsive the unit is, you may need to force the PC into safe mode and disable the AV from starting.
Then of course reboot

The question isn't whether 1 gB is sufficient to run XP; it is whether 1 gB is enough to open 5 or 10 or 20 windows in Internet Explorer 8 on XP. In my experience it is not. Yes the problem could be caused by something else hogging the CPU. The way to tell is to use Task Manager or download the Process Explorer recommended above.

I have a pentium 4 with 1 gB of memory. I installed Internet Explorer 8, but the system could not handle it. So I went back to using Internet Explorer 6, which is the version that comes with XP.

It might be interesting to use the minimum virtual memory allowed by XP, which is 2 Mb. If your problem is excess paging, you may not be able to open many browser windows, but your CPU usage will stay low. That means you need more memory.