here's what the processes look like on the latop that I browse the net with:

Here's what the CPU usage looks like at the same time:

The above pics show a typical XP PC.

However, if the CPU usage in the second pic was 100% then I would have had a problem. The and only time that happened was when this laptop was infected with the Alcan virus. That ended my long term use of Mcafee and promptly caused the installation of NOD32. Never looked back.

Edited June 13, 200620 yr by vinodh

You were right about it being the system idle 90odd%.....it just seems though as if doing the basics has slowed right down since i last used this

I dont know if this is relevant but although i seem to have 3 quarters of my disk space free but when i look at the available physical memory on the sysinternals program it tells me i have 63,940 total but only 460 available..

Here : Total : 1,834,420, Available : 1,161,800

64 Mo of Ram is very little and unsurprisingly almost everything is used, especially with the collection of background apps you seem to have.

Your system must be using the swap file a lot and that is where your performance hit is most probably. Free disk space would be a further issue only if there was not enough space left for the swap. And then you would most probably run into stability problems.

You should clean up your startup. There is probably plenty of memory resident apps you don't need there.

All that is not windows AFAIK (but I might be wrong for some) :

ctfom.exe

reminder.exe

EM_EXEC

multimedia keyboard

TKBELLEXE

lv coms

smc service

igfx tray

hotkeyscmds

mstdc

ssdpsrv

smc service

autostart ms sqlserver7.0

service manager

Do you really need it all running ? It would certainly help with the performance of your machine to have some not running as you have so little physical RAM.

IMO 512MB of RAM is the minimum to be somehow comfortable with ME and only above 1GB do you begin laughing.

Compare the Win2000 theme as, for example, optionally delivered by the Unofficial 98 Second Edition Service Pack, to Win2K itself, or XP with the LUNA-isms turned off, or to ME. It would appear that cosmetics mean a whole lot to some people who know nada about what's under the hood.

The optionnal color scheme in the USP that is the exact same as the default Win2k and ME color schemes so what difference should there be with it and the Win2k or ME ones ?

Edited June 13, 200620 yr by eidenk

System Idle Process is normally at 100% when the CPU is idle. No concern.

lol !

idle means that % is availible......lmao !

Here's mine BTW: