My comp is behaving rather strangely as of late.... it seems to stutter much more than usual and takes a long time "reading" to do even simple things. I am running Windows XP Professional, a 966Mhz P3, and 256 RAM. I am currently playing Baldur's gate two, and to load up the game takes at least 2-3 minutes, with severe stuttering in the game, but its not just Baldur's gate... it seems loading every application takes 5 times as long as it used to. I have installed a device called RAM Cleaner and it says I have 142MB available and 26% CPU usage... is this normal? I remember reading a thread by Daerk saying how to do something with Virtual Memory to override the default WinXP settings, but don't know if this will apply to me. Any help would be appreciated... I want to finish my solo Assassin!

These symptoms are new to your machine? You say it's stuttering "more than usual", is that kind of behaviour normal for your computer? Your specs would seem OK for running WinXP, not great certainly, but adequate. Have you done the "basic" stuff first... Like cleaning and defragmenting your HDD's? Run your virus scanner and scanned for spy ware? Have you or anyone else downloaded or installed any new applications lately?

Showing 142Mb of available memory out of 256Mb installed, strikes me as lower than normal, while a report of 26% CPU usage seems high; but I'm not a hard core techie, so I'll defer to anyone who says those numbers are within normal limits. Still... that strikes me as a little "off".

Well, its not like it was insanely fast before, but I have definately noticed a drop in performance withing the last few days... I'm downloading ad aware as I type this and I haven't defragged yet... going to wait until the night for that as I have 3 hard drives

Well im going to suggest that whatever is using the 26% of your CPU resources is what is slowing down your computer as that isnt normal for winXP. As when the computer is sitting idleing it should be using very little of your CPU.

Go into taskmanager then click on the "processes" tab and see what process is using that 26% of your CPU. Now you have the choice of either posting here what process is using the CPU and hope that someone knows what it is and how to properly disable it....or just right click on the process and click on "End Process" The worst that can happen by clicking on end process is that windows will crash....

hmm, quite a strange one, i too have a pentium 3, but mines 500mhz, and i use a radeon 9000 pro (video card), and baldurs gate 2 runs smoothly for me, except whenever there are heaps of spells and traps going off, especially if i play it at 32 bit, which doesnt make much a difference in 16bit.
if you cant fix this problem, format, make sure you back up beforehand, format, re-install everything, and everything will be fine....of course...youll have to go through an hour of re-installing everything

Well, I defragged last night and ad-awared yesterday... no results. I checked under the porcesses, and System Idle Process seems to fluctuate between 79-97 and another thing called slsk.exe fluctuates between 00 and 20ish... this is under the CPU column in the Processes tab when I ctrl+alt+del... At the bottom of that window it says cpu usage from 7-20%, but when I hover over RAMCleaner in the taskbar it says 35%.. Very strange. I tried closing ramcleaner but still no-go... I hope I don't have to format. Is it possible that installing a new Hard drive could have caused this (thats the only thing that changed in the last few days)? I installed BG2 on the new drive and it everything was fun, but 2 days later it got like this. I've tried virus scans, the whole nine yards. Frustating to say the least

Well you have a virus on your computer called W32/Spybot-V

Here is some information on it and instructions on how to remove it !!

http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/w...w32spybotv.html

After you do the instructions to remove it, i would recomend you download the newest virus update list for your anti-virus software and do a full system scan !

I can't believe people don't know it when they have a virus on it but rely on stupid outdated virusscanners that do nothing instead.

ALWAYS check your HKey_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\ entries in the registry, and always remove what you don't like there and always know it when there is something in there that shouldn't be there.

Kids...