Deteriorating laptop performance.

I have recently been experiencing a loss performance to my Dell laptop which runs under XP (Home Edition). It has a 1.5Ghz centrino chip and memory of 512mb.

Viewing the CPU Usage in the Windows Task Manager usually fluctuates between 25% - 50% when hooked up to the web and the response time is generally pretty good. The problem seems to begin when running a video clip. For instance a couple of days ago I looked at a couple of the clips of Planet Earth on the BBC website. It takes a while to load but eventually gets going. WTM then shows CPU usage right up to 100%. Perhaps this is normal but the trouble is that this rate of usage stays at 100% even after the clip finishes and the window is closed. At this stage the screen can go blank and the touchpad refuses to acknowledge any contact. Being locked out like this can last for a few minutes. Any ideas as to what can be the cause of this problem? Any help appreciated.

Not an overly powerful PC. Web designers like to make the content "richer" (=busier and more resource-hungry) all the time.

Have you done housekeeping? Virus and spyware scans, disk defrag? And if you look at Task Manager, is there anything running you didn't expect or don't need?

Also, do you know what the graphics card is? My ability to view clips improved when I fitted a new, faster card (had been on on-board SIS graphics before - not a laptop) and saved me buying a new PC.

(BTW I have a 1.5GHz Athlon, 768MB memory and an AGP card running at 4x due to old Motherboard, just watched the "Blind Texas Salamander" clip at 30% to 40% CPU usage with a spike at start and stop).

Thanks for the response, John. No, I cannot see anything running that should not be there and I have checked this out in Process Explorer as well.

I have a 70Gb hard drive but only seem to use about 10% of this hence when I invoke the defrag tool it usually says that this task is unnecessary; despite this I have run it previously. I have done a disk cleanup during the last week. I run quite a few anti-virus software packages: Ad-aware (at the end of each session); AVG (weekly); Spyware Doctor (twice weekly); Spybot Search and Destroy (weekly). I was using MS Beta but convinced myself that it was this that was causing the machine to slow so uninstalled it . As this last step proved to be unfounded I will probably download it again. By the way, I do not run any of this stuff concurrently, always one at a time.

The graphics card is an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200. If this is a weak link can it be upgraded on a laptop?

The graphics card is a bit better than mine, so I've run out of ideas. Might be some kind of setting or incompatability; if your Windows and Drivers are up to date and you have some kind of checker (I use Norton One-button) then it's beyond me. Wrong size of system.

Keep an eye on what processes are using you CPU usage when you connect to the net. It could be that a few applications are checking and installing updates!!

Doc Lenny said:

Keep an eye on what processes are using you CPU usage when you connect to the net. It could be that a few applications are checking and installing updates!!

Click to expand...

I would have thought that any updates installed by these applications would be picked up by the anti-virus software (which all show a clean bill of health). Clearly I will keep an eye on things and let you know of any further developments.

Thanks for your help guys.