system resources being eaten up

For some reason my computer is being really slow. I can't even have a IE window open at the same time as I have a movie/song playing in windows media player. When I press cntl+alt+del, the system resources are bouncing around @ 25-75%. The two big ones on the list are IE and yahoo messenger. Something else is causing them to take up so much resources to run. They are running at 30 000 +.

What can I do?

 

Hello drecollet,

Step one would be to look at what's starting up:
http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=39425

You may also have an infected system or a hardware problem or a conflict. Have you tried disabling Yahoo?

To see whether its an infected system:

Please download HijackThis!
SetUp from http://downloads.malwareremoval.com/HJTsetup.exe
Save the file to your desktop.

Double-click the HijackThis!
SetUp icon to begin the installation.
Follow the prompts for the default install location of:'C:\Program Files\HijackThis'.
Tick the 'Create a desktop' button when the option appears.
Select next, then allow HijackThis! to start.

Then press the [Scan] button.
You will notice the [Scan] button will turn into a [Save Log] button.
Click the [Save Log] button and notepad will open up with the contents of the scan.
Right-click in the saved log, and select 'copy'.

Then proceed to your original thread, unless otherwise instructed and click the '[Reply]' button and paste the saved contents to be reviewed.

Do not make any modifications to the log or perform any 'fixes' until told to do so.

Regards - Charles

 

The first thing I would do is find out what all I have runing at startup
Review each item carefully and decide what you can do without at startup
Sound like you may have quite a few more item than you need
To do this I suggest you go to http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml
download and install (free) startup control panel by mike lin
put a shortcut on your desktop
double click and open the file and remove the checkmark from any item you can do without at startup.
restart your computer

Second, I would download, install and run ccleaner (free)
it will remove a lot of temp files which you may have then restart
it can be found at http://www.ccleaner.com/
let's see how this works before doing anything else
good luck