I run the free Comcast McAfee and it does not slow down my puter one bit. It's a hell of a lot better than Norton in my experience (5 years Norton and 3 years McAfee)
I was jumping the gun saying removing McAfee did the trick. The success was very short lived and the same problem remains. Now I have open this SysInternals prog, and it shows the responsible process for the CPU being at 50%: "Process: Interrupts, PID: N/A, CPU: +- 43%, Description: Hardware Interrupts, Company Name: -" Anyone have any idea? It seems to me some kind of hardware conflict that keeps sending an cpu intensive error? ps. i am googling the problem, seems i am not the only one, thanks gts for pointing out sysinternals.
Interesting, I am running it now for comparison and the two lines after "System Idle Process" both show no cpu usage ever. If you're googling I'm sure you've come across the same articles but the best way to track this down I would imagine would be something like this: http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/29649207/hardware-interrupts-and-h.aspx Hardware interrupts and High CPU time - Mycroft Holmes 13-Apr-07 05:14:25 After a looong and painful search, I collected the following information: 1) this IRQ level is usually a symptom of some hardware fault OR a bad driver (which I exclude, since I observed the pc to run fine) 2) there's NO (free/shareware) utility that monitors IRQ in real time 3) try to boot in safe mode and see if the problem disappears (mine does not) 4) if it does, boot nomally and try disabling devices one by one until you find it 5) if it does not, it's one of the vital devices (ram/drive controller/mainboard) 5A) try swapping/reducing ram banks 5B) try to attach your hard drive to a different controller (I cannot do this...) 5C) try booting from a livecd and see if the problem persists Hope this helps...