I have had problems with the CPU usage spiking to 100 causing the fan speed to race at its highest level. Is there anything I can do to decrease this CPU usage and fan speed from going bonkers. I have 1 GB of RAM and Ram Saver Pro says I have about 700 mb even when the CPU spikes like that. It is most noticeable when McAfee is running a viral scan. Even opening Adobe Acrobat Standard Edition might cause it to race. As I type this for no reason at all the fan has kicked up speed. Sometimes it gets locked into such a high speed I have to reboot for it to reset. After all of the programs startup it finally settles down. Now it settled down about 1 minute after I just said it began to pick up. I have a Compaq Presario 5430US Pentium 4 1.8 GHz running Windows XP Service Pack 2 with 1 GB DDR Ram.

As you probably know there is a relationship between the CPU temp and its fan speed, should be left alone, in short...if it aint broke, don't fix it.

As for the CPU usage, where are you reading this figure, and how long does it go to 100. If you go to the task manager, under processes you will find the CPU usage shown in percentages at the bottom of the page, is this where you are reading this, or are you looking a the system idle process figure?

Has the PC always done this since it was new?

If it has always done this since it was new, the only thing that you can do is replace the fan with a quieter fan.

If the problem started recently, check to make sure that the CPU heat sink is not dusty. A dusty heat sink will cause the CPU to run hot and the fan to run faster.

What exactly is Ram Saver Pro?
According to Fred Langa, third party ram release programs circumvent proper ram control by the operating system and are less than worthless as they can even cause problems to occur.

XP will utilize all available ram for system processes when other aps aren't using it and forcing aps and processes out of ram will make them over utilize the page file or even fail.

Excerpt from Langalist:

"Dear Fred From a very grateful subscriber to your Plus edition...

I refer to your http://langa.com/newsletters/2004/2004-11-29.htm#9 edition and the subject of Memory Optimizers, which you suggest are scams etc. I use FreeRam XP Pro - which is a totally free utility - hardly a scam to start with ! I have a full 1024 MB of ram fitted and when I first start using the computer daily, it usually shows between 695 and 710 MB i.e. 68% Ram free."

It's a confusing subject, Geoff--- one made more so by the purveyors of "memory optimizers," some of whom are themselves confused, and others of whom *want* you to be confused so you'll use their products.

Here's the problem: With most computer things that can be "used up" (hard drive space, bandwidth, etc.) you want as much to be *un*used as possible. But it's just the opposite with RAM, because unused RAM is wasted RAM.

That's worth repeating, because it's the central point: Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

Thus, any tool that "frees up" RAM or "creates holes in RAM" or any similar thing is really creating a pool of unused--- wasted!--- RAM.

You see, your RAM is the fastest memory your PC has. Memory operations in RAM operate at nanosecond speeds (billionths of a second), six orders of magnitude faster than the millisecond speeds (thousandths of a second) of memory operations written to a hard drive, as "virtual memory" in the PC's swapfile.

"Freeing RAM" means you're taking data and code out of the fastest memory your system has and transferring it to the swapfile on disk, which is the *slowest* memory your system normally has. That doesn't help you. In fact, it slows you down!

Windows does a pretty good job of keeping your RAM more or less optimally full, *which is the way you want it* because you WANT as much stuff as possible kept in the fastest-available storage. When RAM gets too full, Windows correctly dribbles out the least-used and least-important code and data to the slower hard-drive storage of virtual memory; and that too is just what you want.

"Memory optimizers" can actually reverse this process so that you end up with unused areas in your best and fastest memory; and tons of code and data shifted to your worst and slowest memory (on the hard drive). In other words, they can do the exact opposite of what they claim; slowing you down, not speeding you up!

There's still more to the topic, but to save space, let me point you to a fuller explanation, including the possible rare exceptions to the above: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showA...icleID=17200583

But for the overwhelming majority of users, for the overwhelming majority of the time, memory optimizers are junk."
-Fred Langa

I would try uninstalling the "Ram Saver Pro" and see if your problem clears up. If it doesn't - you may have other things causing your system to overextend such as malware or other hardware problems.

One other thing I noticed with the Compaq/HP computers we have... they have plastic mounts for the processor fans. I have had more than one of these mounts to break on one of the four "clip" points allowing the heatsink not to seat properly. This caused the fan to intermittenly speed up ten fold to compensate for excess heat. Take a look...

I am about to uninstall RAM SAVER PRO. When I went to Control Panel the fan kicked into its INDY Speed level when I cliked on ADD or REMOVE SOFTWARE Programs!!!! I tried that again after the uninstall and it raced again, but is now quieting down. What is causing this fan speed to spped up?

I have noticed this happens if I am running Lavasoft Ad Aware & Virus scans on McAfee or Norton. ( I uninstalled Norton Internet Security when I installed McAfee)

The higher the CPU utilization the hotter the CPU gets. The hotter the CPU gets the faster the fan runs to try to cool it.