Old Laptop Issue?

m1chael

All-

Hope someone can point me in the right direction here. I am working on a laptop for a friend of mine and granted (its pretty old and really outdated as far as hardware goes) and I am having some trouble with it. I just restored it back to original factory settings (basically rebuilt it) and its running xp home. I think I have narrowed it down to whenever its hooked up to the net the cpu usage stays high...real high. I bring up task manager and under processes I don't see anything out of the ordinary but when I go to performance the cpu meter is pegged and hard drive is on constantly? When I disconnect it from the net (either hard wire or wireless) the cpu goes down and the hard drive usage slows...so that is what gives me the idea its got something to do with maybe a program running or trying to update or whatever. I turned off auto update so its not that, I turned off auto update for virus protection so not that...not sure what else to check. It is hard for me to differentiate between needed system resources running and something that doesn't need to run.

What else can I check for or do in this situation?....just some insight to the laptop hardware...800mhz proc w/384 mb ram/

Thanks,
Michael

tiersten

If you did a factory install then you've gone back several service packs and the laptop is extremely vulnerable to remote network attacks. Reinstall again and patch it before plugging it into the internet.

Plantwiz

What is your ram and CPU usage?

Go into Task manager and find the results under permformance.

Also,
go through processes and search for the ones you do not recognize and see if they are needed and can be turned off.

Otherwise,
the ram could be bad (so run MemTest86)
CPU may be too hot
Drivers could be out of date (search for newer ones)

And while XP can run on an 800MHz, you may be expecting a lot from the hardware you have.

ccie15672

Go here. Follow the guide, disable everything you can.