High CPU usage

Im looking at a PC using W98se. Recently it's begun to perform really slowly but only after running for a short while.

Norton Internet Security was recently installed. PC is PIII 667Mhz 128MB Ram which should manage OK. It's low on ram and one proposal is to double this as the system monitor shows memory usage around 350MB (128 ram + swapfile).

The slowdown has occured when two other users on the network switch on their PC's although this may be just a coincidence.

During examining what was going on I used the System resources facility that was available on 98 with a graph to show CPU usage. Curiously though as I closed down applications the usage increased until everything was closed (including Explorer and Systray) and the usage was still at 80% occasionally rising to 90%. Oh and the network cable was disconnected.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Regards

GHB

 

Hi GHB,

Suggest you do a thorough cleanup, uninstall any unneeded programs (Add/Remove Programs).
Then run Scandisk (better in Safe Mode).
Then defrag.

Run msconfig (enter msconfig at the Start > Run command line). Go to the Startup tab and uncheck those programs that are obviously unnecessary. Identify those that you are not sure about.

At the desktop do Ctrl-Alt-Del, see if there are programs that would be unnecessary. Uninstall them or find out how they can be be run manually (from Start > Programs) rather than running in the background.

Before putting more RAM in, I would find out if there were things utilising all the resources. The Internet Security will use quite a bit itself (Norton is good at that ). See if you can reduce the levels that you could run or oversee yourself.

Matt