Vista - Vista 64bit Any game 100% CPU

Well hello all, hate to be my first post to be a question but gotta start somewhere :-p

Well as you can read, recently my computer has been acting weird, games have been lagging horribly and my cpu usage goes all the way up to 100% regardless of the game.. I tried the most low graphics game and still 100%

System specs..

Vista Home Premium 64 bit
4 gigs of ram.
AMD Turion x2 ultra duel core 2.10 GHz
ATI RAdeon HD 3200 Graphics card


Any help would be great guys.. thanks a ton

Paul

P.s - I use Avira for antivirus and Ad-aware for adware

Welcome Paw, 99% of first posts are trouble related

Have you tried the usual suspects? A virus scan etc

Have you looked in TaskManager to see which process / es are maxing out your CPU usage? (right-click on your taskbar,>select task manger> show processes from all users>check the CPU field)

Do you remember installing something around the time it started to slow? Made any system changes?

Had a look in msconfig to see if there are any odd apps in the startup list?
(WIN+R>type msconfig>select Start Up Tab)

Is the CPU usage constant, or does it settle down after sometime?

I just noticed your other post. Try to keep to one thread in order to avoid confusion

Well it settles down, it just jumps to 100% when any sort of video game is on, low graphics or high graphics. I did all the typical things, defraged, virus scan, ad aware, and i only got 2 warnings for my virus software couple things from ad aware that got removed but still the same..

I used to use adaware but now i use spybot, (The home of Spybot-S&D!) it seems to find more things, but most likely its not a piece of spyware it could be someing insane like, a run away process.

These are the steps I would use,

1. right click on your battery icon and make sure the power settings are set to "hi performance and notbattery saving" or whatever its called you will see 3 options high perf/balanced/power saving or something. Power saving drops the power to the video card and processor, even if you are plugged into the ac adapter, it will cause crazy lag in some games.

2. of course if this is not a laptop this wont work, but it is one of the culprits that I have seen make this happen. Try that then tell me if it works, if not ill give you more
good luck,