Computer slow as leap year Christmas

I have a Dell Optiplex 170L with Windows XP, SP2, Home Edition. It has a Pentium 4 processor.

Here is the problem, it has become so slow that at times it locks up for 15 to 20 seconds to complete just opening a Microsoft Works file.

I have run Spybot S&D, CCCleaner and McAfee and found nothing.

Today a green square box showed up in the Task Bar. It showed the CPU running at 100%. I checked the computer over several hours and it continued to run 100%. The last time I checked the CPU was constantly varying from about 10% to 100%. I opened the Task Manager and found that as the CPU usage got higher iexplore would go up. I also noticed that I have two iexplore process running in Task Manager. One has a memory usage of 11,128k and the other 90,280k

Can anyone tell me why the CPU runs at 100% most of the time, when nothing is being done on the computer, why I have two iexplore exe's on the Task Manager, and how to fix this problem with this computer. Thanks

Because you don't have at least SP3 installed...the system is more vulnerable to malware than others.

As for IE processes (iexplore.exe), anytime IE is used there should be at least two reflected in Task Manager. An additional instance is created for each additional IE window open at that time, while one is reflected all the time, as a basic ccmponent of Windows.

I suspect that the RAM used by any IE process...varies with page content. I currently show one window reflect about 65,000k, with 3 others ranging from 40,000 to 60,000. I have no malware issues .

Louis

Edited by hamluis, 31 December 2010 - 06:27 PM.

As Lois has suggested try to install windows xp sp3 from this site http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=5b33b5a8-5e76-401f-be08-1e1555d4f3d4&displaylang=en

Ok, thanks everyone.