Slow machine and high cpu

Hello,
I have a lap top Aspire with Vista basic. Lately the machine has become non responive every time I try to click on anything. It takes forever to connect to the net or simply to open Outlook. i found that the CPU is running near or at 100% and I simply don't know what to do?

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.
Carol

Welcome Carol Sorry that you are having problems

Download malwarebytes and run the full scan after your update
Run a full antivirus scans
These are the full scans and take about an hour each
Try a clean boot.
How to troubleshoot a problem by performing a clean boot in Windows Vista or in Windows 7 to determine the problem

Using the task manager make sure that all the ram is actually being used rather than ram not recognized.
Right click on task bar for task manager

Hello Richard,
Thank you for your help. There is another piece to this story. I belong to ITOK and called them last Wed. They ran all the appropriate scans - they were working on it for nearly 7 hours. I did not receive a message from them about what they found. Well, by Thurs. afternoon my machine was acting up again... I have been unable to get in touch with them to fix the machine. As you probably know they are not inexpensive to deal with.
They promised the moon and I haven't even got off the launch pad yet.
Have you had any experiences with them? I have a call in and I wait and wait and wait...
carol

No I do not Carol, Fortunately, I have learned a lot about computers, a lot from this site, that I am more or less self sufficient.
Maybe you can save the money, lets try to work together and get this done.