Help/advice needed with new HP laptop
 

Hi All,

I'm not sure if any one can help with this but i hope so.

I have a brand new (60 days) hp laptop running vista home premium, now unlike a lot of people i have been very happy with Vista - i have it running on another HP laptop - any way something is causing the processor to max out about every 45- 90 seconds. Its centrino with 3g ram and not a lot installed on it.

I have tried shutting programmes down and trying to figure out what may be causing this with out luck - and yes I am trying to avoid to 30 min wait on the HP support line!!

Any thought would be greatly apprectiated.

Have you tried just watching task manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del then Start Task Manager, or Start | Run | Taskmgr or right-click on the start bar and choose task manager) to see what process is using the CPU?

One of the 'features' of vista is that it appears to boot up quickly. This is somewhat a false impression. It loads enough to get it started straight-away and continues to load additional items afterwards. Some programs have much more overhead than what is needed for startup.

Does the overload issue seem more prevalent when connected to the net? It could also be that any number of things are trying to update themselves. Have you noticed a lot of hard drive activity during this period

As sbm12 suggested, watch your task manager.

Double click on the CPU column to sort it by what is using it the most. Keep an eye on it and something should pop in and out. It's probably one of the updaters updating definition files or something like that or just stuff still booting.

With help from some people here and from Skype CS, I was able to determine that a single application was using most of my resources nearly all the time - even when I had not launched it. It was a "lite" version of Nero, a CD/DVD burning program that came bundled with an external CD/DVD drive.

Perhaps if, after you give enough time for booting to be completed, you might find that an application is dominating your chip.

Thanks for all the responses.