Windows XP forum: High CPU usage...

I'll try the defrag right now.

About buying stuff... I don't have money right now, but I could save to buy 1 of those... which would be better to put my money into? more RAM or a graphic card?

Motherboard drivers? where? (sorry, I'm a noob)

What direction should I look in for a very similar problem except I already have 512mb of ram.
Computer is Compaq Presario 5000
Running wimxp home version 2002 with service pack 2
Have cleaned using the usual suggested anti parasite programs and it did improve some. but performance is still far from what I feel it should be. I can run some of the games, Sims, for ex. much better on my much older Gateway 550,win98se, with only 256mb ram.
Any guidance would be uch appreciated

Will be able to handle the fancy xp stuff.But need a little more explanation regarding - also note tweak your bios to optimized default's. afraid that is a little over my head. Can you expound on that to allow me to give it a shot
Thanks
EZ

If you want to get technical... The BIOS is a PC only thing. Most other systems have some sort of a boot ROM setup. Sun workstations, for example, have a limited administrative type shell built into the boot ROM, complete with ethernet access. So you can quite easily get away with never having a monitor attached to a system if you want.

Also, Via chipsets aren't really that bad, unless you mean the Pentium versions of which I have no experience. However, on the AMD side of the fence, they provide great low cost, high feature, chipsets. They may not be the best performers, but they usually come in pretty middle of the road. nVidia's are usually top performers, Via is in the middle, and SiS is at the bottom.

Congrats on reaching the "enough to be dangerous" level of understanding though. Very few people ever even make it that far. However, you've still got a ways to go before you should probably be giving complex advice.

is Basic Input Output System. Has always been. Lotsa folks relatively new to computing have been mangling existing acronyms mercilessly for years, and this tragedy must be stopped.

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/B/BIOS.html

http://www.sharpened.net/glossary/definition.php?bios

http://www.learnthat.com/define/view.asp?id=171

http://www.answers.com/topic/bios

etcetera ad nauseum ... google it if you like.

It's this type of thing that's the reason I am on this site.I know just enough to be dangerous,but smart enough to realize that fact.I always try to get some guidance here, before going in and changing this and that just to see what the outcome might be.Sometimes advice is given that is beyond my knowledge,and I am never comfortable using it without further explanation.Any suggestions to what path I might follow to attempt to alleviate this aggravating condition.
Thanks
EZ

Hello replace both graphics card and the ram in order to get
best performace and compatibility, there nothing worse than getting
one, then having to waste time going back to get the other.

Personally, I don't subscribe to the whole disk defragmenting theory. I figure the amount of time you spend defragmenting a drive far outstrips any meager performance gains you might get from it, and it just adds unnecessary wear and tear on the drive. Maybe some day Microsoft will "innovate" a feature Linux has had for 5-6 years at least, in a self-defragmenting file system.

Given your situation, when you run a 3D game, it's not uncommon for your CPU to jump to 100% utilization. It's actually pretty normal. Especially with the "deep pipes" P4. Intel made a conscious decision to trade performance for high clock speed when they designed the P4. What I think your main problem is, is a lack of RAM. Contrary to the other poster, XP really only needs 256MB for itself, so generally you don't want to run it with less than 512MB. Of course the more the better, so if you ever see a deal on a 512MB stick, don't think that you need to remove your 256MB stick.

I would also be sure to scan your system for spyware. If you use Internet Explorer, it's pretty much a guarantee you've got some. You can search these forums or use Google to figure out how to get rid of the spyware... Keeping it off involves swearing off IE and Outlook Express. I'd suggest Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird as replacements myself.

Later on, when your financial situation improves (and you've got at least 512MB of RAM), a better video card might not hurt. Since you neglect to mention what model card you have, based on the other specs in your system, my guess would be probably a TNT2 or GeForce2. Both are fairly antiquated for today's games.

The seek time on most drives made today, are around 10ms. That's about as long as it takes to blink an eye. Fragmentation really isn't an issue any longer. With drives now coming standard with 8MB and 16MB buffers, you'd be amazed. The problem has more to do with the crap I/O speeds of Windows. I'm not joking at all... Compare the speed of Windows doing routine file operations (save, delete, move, copy) and compare it to Linux or FreeBSD. You'll see a marked difference.

Defragmenting is like screensavers. Once upon a time it served a purpose, but that time has come and gone. It's time to let these urban legends die off.

I agree that most users won't see much benefit from defragging a drive often, but people using large applications or applications with very large files will definitely see improvement. Try installing something like WebSphere Application Developer or any large development environment. WebSphere lays down 12000+ files and the difference in bringing up a complex application within it can be a difference of minutes if the drive is not defragged. Even people uncompressing large files (rar, zip) will see a difference, though for 1 time operations, who really cares? But if your game regularly accesses an amount of file data that exceeds the drives cache capacity then the drive's cache doesn't really help. It simply holds data that you are never going to use again. In this case, reducing the amount of head movement in the physical disk via defragging can be very helpful.

Defrag will make a huge difference if the paging file is badly fragmented. Unfortunately, XP's built in defrag doesn't fix that. Fortunately, that file doesn't get fragmented too often.

I'd have to respectfully disagree that Linux does any better than Windows. Chasing around inodes has the same problem as chasing around NTFS fragments; the head has to move. And Windows does a pretty decent job of buffer management so I/O is cached. Compare XP to DOS (which has no caching) with a program that just writes to disk and you will see the difference. Even if you specify immediate disk writes (again, no caching), XP does pretty well. I haven't seen any comparisons, so it is just a subjective comparison.

I agree with what you say. I'd still submit that the occasional defrag (monthly or so) is a good thing in a Windows box. Even on general machines (email, web surfing, etc) I've seen some good improvements if defrag hadn't been done in a long time. But your right (and I think, or hope, I qualified my last post to the same effect) that defrag won't be seen as much of a plus in most cases.

If you don't mind answering, I'm curious about the allocation of space for the ext2/3 systems. wouldn't the application need to know and say somehow on the open what the eventual expected size of the file is and if the file is just a sequential stream like a log, wouldn't such a file naturally fragment?
I thought the same claim of contiguous space for files of predetermined size was also made for NTFS as of Win2K. Maybe not.

The way to enhance your game performance is to increase the RAM on the computer and have fun!! Trust me its just a RAM issue more than anything else...

Most of the time if your video card doesn't meet the minimum requirements or isn't compatible, the game won't play. Freezing and interrupted play sounds more like not enough memory.

The minimum requirements are listed on the game box. It's been my experience that you really need more than the minimum for the game to play correctly.

No... Win98 and Me are DOS based versions of Windows, and have whole different hosts of problems. Not to mention Win98 is pretty much EOLd, so no more security updates for it, and WinMe is very soon to follow.

If you want a somewhat different opinion... I've personally gotten back into console gaming instead of PC gaming. That way, I can easily run Linux, which can perform much better with less powerful hardware compared to Windows, and still get my gaming fix pretty much any time. Take it for what it's worth... It may or may not appeal to you.