services.exe - I know what's in it and how to view it but is there anyway to view which item causes a CPU hit every few seconds or do you have to disable each item in it until you find the culprit. Will disabling items in it cause any other problem?

Virtual memory - what actually goes into that to make it low. I know how to make it bigger but I'm just curious as to what is actually in it?

Cheers

Try downloading process explorer,that may help you find it quicker. Bibs

Yep I've done that, thanks. You get to know what's going on but I'm trying to get beneath that layer. I can't see any info anywhere about how to view below that initial layer so I can isolate it. I'm wondering if people just do a process of elimination or something more scientific.

I guess most people would post a Hijackthis log over at techguy forums or similar, they are really helpful. Tells you a lot if you know what you are looking for.
AFAIK it could be anything from wlan to usb to antivirus, but how to solve it in the way you describe is beyond my knowledge.

Would be interested to know the eventual outcome, if you wouldnt mind posting.

bibs

Yeah I'll post any findings. Watching youtube and videos has gone a bit like watching HD too. No virus, as far as a I know, but performance has gone downhill. I want to sort these spikes though and then attack what's making videos slow.

Not sure if this may apply, but i had to disable the windows indexing service on mine, as it was constantly faffing around in the background, sometimes up to 100% cpu. Any cpu intensive tasks i was doing such as video editing was a complete and utter nightmare. Unless you use the windows search function a lot, or know it isnt that for sure, its worth a try. 

bibs

 I had similar problems almost a year ago today. I was "cryin' in my beer so to speak. The whole thing developed into an interesting conversation that would make a train blush, but I learned a lot. You can read about that here for kicks if you want.

http://forum.cakewalk.com...y+beer+man&mpage=1

 However the above post didn't help as much with cpu spiking. Brandon, I hope you are still this loose man!

 This post was the most helpful helpful. Particularly the post by Agundrum. I hope his links are still solid here,a lot of good info on tweaking your PC against these types of thing. It made the entire difference between my PC working well and spiking .

http://forum.cakewalk.com...16&high=cpu+spikes


....now let me get off my *ahem* backside and get something done.

Cheers for the input. I'll read up. The workings of a PC is NOT my strength.

Quick update: I haven't tried anything radical yet as I don't want my PC to implode but it's certainly getting worse. Video sometimes plays completely in slow motion, although the audio is at the correct speed and even on the lowest quality on youtube it's spluttering and popping and out of sync. All very strange.

if you computer is not set up and tweaked which can be found in a search on the Internet, then perhaps that is the problem. http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml If you have a Windows Computer which at this time no one knows.