CPU PROBLEM NEED HELP

I really do not recommend going back to XP with a laptop that came with Vista. Most store-bought computers come with Vista-exclusive hardware installed and you will probably cripple most of your key components by reverting to XP because XP drivers will not exist for them. For example, when I reverted to XP on a desktop that I had purchased, my ethernet card, multi-function card reader, DVD drive, swappable drive, media card, and soundcard were all rendered useless because they were Vista-exclusive hardware. Your dad was right. If you have not reverted to XP, DON'T. In my case, because I have a desktop and I had spare cash, I replaced all the components with XP-compatible ones. On a laptop, you're screwed.

Also, these guys are full of crap and your computer should not lag running Vista. Vista is a hog, but any PC with a gig of RAM and a processor clocking over 1 Ghz (even a lame Celeron M) should be fine. You clearly have some kind of malware infecting your system, especially because this problem started recently.

Be honest: Have you been pirating software and/or looking at porn (I bet you have because you mentioned you have a torrent program)? I won't judge you for either because I've certainly done a fair bit of both, but if you have, I recommend you be much more careful in the future. Porn and piracy are almost sure bets to get bad crap installed on your PC. You have to be especially wary of key generators and cracks.

Anyway, here is my advice:

The easiest way to get rid of simple malware is:

1. Click on the "Run" prompt under the start menu.
2. Type in "msconfig"
3. Go to the "Startup" tab
4. Uncheck EVERYTHING. You should probably have done this anyway (it disables all programs from automatically starting up). You probably won't notice any difference in day-to-day operation of your computer sans some programs taking one or two seconds longer to startup.
5. Restart and see if you problem is fixed.

This sometimes doesn't work because some malware is more proficiently programmed and registers as a service and not as a program. If that is the case, follow these steps:

1. Repeat the steps to run msconfig
2. Go to the "Services" tab
3. Uncheck EVERYTHING THAT IS MANUFACTURED BY MICROSOFT CORPORATION.
4. Restart and see if your problem is fixed.

Note that this will disable some features that you probably want to use. If this occurs, go back to your services and enable anything that you can clearly identify and know that you want to use. The malware will probably be an obvious entry. There are more complicated and judicious rules for deciding which services to enable or disable, but I won't go into them here. Disabling extraneous services is key to getting any computer to run properly.

Sometimes malware will claim to be manfactured by Microsoft. If your problem still isn't fixed, go back through your services and uncheck anything, even Microsoft services, that appear suspicious in any way.

If none of this fixes your problem, you have a sophisticated trojan and will probably need to reformat.

As a footnote, I remember one time that an error in Quicktime had caused my computer to behave similarly. Do you have Quicktime installed? There's a chance that might be the root of your problem. If it is, the steps above will eventually fix your problem. The error in Quicktime has to do with a memory access bug or something like that in its automatic updates feature. Always turn off automatic updates for everything you install because that's pretty much the #1 source of computers getting bogged down over time.

author=WIP link=topic=565.msg7632#msg7632 date=1200512515
This is false, actually! I've used Vista on five different machines and XP is still far more responsive. Vista is just slower than XP. That doesn't make it unusable at all.

What I am complaining about is that the other posters were claiming that his computer is not powerful enough to run Vista Basic. That is patently untrue! Of course it's a sluggish piece of crap, but I think these guys were overestimating how much power it needs.

I remember that the minimum requirements to run XP were ridiculously low, like 233mhz or something. That's fine, but in practice you needed a 600mhz machine to run it effectively.

I wouldn't touch Vista unless I had at least a 1.8ghz machine with 1GB of RAM.