first thing i'd do is shit can speedfan because the motherboard should control fan speed and if it wants 100% it needs 100%. and if you don't like the noise clean the dust off the heat sink and change the fan and or heat sink, assuming you have the intel stock cooler, to something quieter. besides messing with fan control who the fuck knows what else you've been installing or messing with. to much shit coding around too, i opened an offshore fishing forum friday morning and unknowingly left the tab open all day. at the end ofthe day that forum home page was using nearly 2 gigs of memory. Best practice is to keep it as clean as possible, hardware and software.
I agree with much that has already been mentioned. I will assume you have a desktop for sake of argument. As noted in some other posts, replace the CPU fan, the new one should come with some heat sink paste if not you will need to buy some. Also, I would replace any and all fans you have in the system since they could be going bad and not cooling it down. You need to open up the system and blow out all the dust with a can of air. I would also replace the power supply and make sure the new one is better and stronger than the old one. Your power supply could be failing after 2 years. As noted, make sure you have an up to date anti-virus / anti-spyware program running. If its a really bad virus, you may need to back up your data and reformat the HD and reinstall Windows if you can't remove it with software. Finally, get some software to do hardware checks. Make sure the memory and hard drive are not going bad. Also do a Google search of your model of computer and make sure that it is not one of the lemons that had a bad motherboard. Note I have had warranty replacements after the 1 year warranty has been up for a computer that had a defective part that was recalled.
aside from components, some antivirus sw can significantly slow down the computer's operation, McAfee for one, too many utilities serving no useful purpose when I remember I disable the free AntiVir I use and don't allow it automatic updates, it isn't necessary to run antivirus when one's trading. McAfee was 'checking' every X minutes for updates the other possibility is any firewall sw you're using, that might slowdown operations if it also checks for updates also do you use a cache cleaner ? - http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner - there are others
get rid of all the antivirus stuff, just use the free one from Microsoft and set it's scan times to be when you are not using the computer.
+1 to MSE (msft sec essentials). run cc cleaner at least once a week. download the portable version of revo uninstaller which imho is the best free uninstaller b/c it gets everything a program installs which the windows uninstaller won't. scroll to bottom of page for portable version. http://www.revouninstaller.com/revo_uninstaller_free_download.html
Agreed. Also, the microsoft stand-alone virus scanner, including the one that boots from CD/DVD, is excellent. I just used the boot-from-CD one yesterday to fix a problems on my sons laptop. It's essentially the same as MSE, but made for one-time runs.
I found the microsoft search indexer a huge nuisance that slows down my computer AND keeps the fan on high all the time. I never use this slow and clunky search feature in microsoft anyway so I turned it off and now my computer is fast, cool, and quiet. This indexer will not show up in task manager unless you click on "show processes from all users" button.
If you have Norton or McAfee, uninstall these. Unfortunately even after a uninstall parts of these antivirus software will continue to run in the background. These days every programmer thinks their piece of shit software warrants being run in the background from start up, use piriform to disable non microsoft start ups like adobe. Some Microsoft updates will kill your cpu, If you use a good firewall, you can disable automated microsoft updates. For XP the best firewall is Kerio, it was so good they killed it, but if you look around you may find the old version floating around for free. However I think your problem is none of the above. Your problem is you are browsing the interwebs while running IB TWS. Given java.* is running in the background during high cpu cycles, I'm positive your problem is IB TWS. This platform is very poorly written and being java based it is like a virus unto itself. The solution is to kill all processes including Firefox when using this poorly written trading platfform. I haven't updated TWS in a while as I find every iteration to be worse in memory management than the previous version.
Actually my experience is IB TWS does not hog the CPU. I run it every day during market hours and my computer is cool as a cucumber. However, what I find is Firefox is extremely expensive. It eats not only CPU time, but has a huge memory footprint. Moreover there are definite bugs in Firefox -- after visiting different web sites, Firefox often gets stuck with extremely high cpu and memory usage and needs to be restarted. I have since switched to Chrome and have not had any problems like that.
I agree with ssrrkk. Java is definitely not a problem and I run TWS every day, all day, no problems. FireFox, I have given up on. -David