specce'd out m1330, 100% cpu usage randomly?

Hey everyone,
I recently purchased a refurbished M1330, it's spec's are as follows:2.2 core 2 duo, 3 gigs ram, 160 7200rpm harddrive, and 8400mgs. Got a 4.1 rating on vista gaming experience thing. Anyway, for the first few months I could play regular counter-strike 1.6 without much trouble. But lately I have noticed that sometimes even when nothing else is running that the cpu load suddenly goes to 100% without warning and everything turns sluggish and the computer becomes almost unbearably slow/unusable. And when I first turn on the computer it's fine and I load up counter-strike source and i'm getting 100 or so fps, and within a few minutes it goes down to 50, then a few more minutes 30, 20, then drops down to 9 and the cpu load is at 100% again, the mouse becomes sluggish and everything grinds to a halt.

At first I thought it was an overheating problem but I'm using i8k fan to monitor and i'm hovering around 60C which is fairly hot but still fairly reasonable. I updated the bio's and video drivers a few weeks ago as well to no avail. I even used tuneup utilities 2007, turned down all the graphical settings on vista (i have 32bit) also to no avail. I was wondering if anyone else had this problem? any ideas or fixes? Thanks a lot in advance.

 

While your in the game open up your task monitor and try and see if anything is starting and or hogging up a TON of your memory and your CPU cycles. Try running a spyware and antivirus scan as well.

 

It may be a Vista problem, not the laptop itself.

 

i have the same exact problem, it even happens just playing STARCRAFT or brousing the web. dell keeps telling me its my fault, and that i need to format my computer and reinstall the drivers in a specefic order. Even after that it still has the same problem, utterly useless.

 

Definately Vista

 

my explorer.exe was using up a lot of cPU
I had to get rid of my dreamscape background and it was fine

 

I'm having this same problem now. I dont want to start from scratch either. I really dont see anything taking up a lot of my CPU%. *Sigh*

 

Did you guys turn off Windows Vista's Indexing service? That thing takes a lot of CPU power. Try turning it off, or turn off the XML file extension indexing. See if that helps.

 

I turned of the indexing service back in February it says. I was going through my process list to see what is going on. I can't figure it out. It just randomly goes to 100%. This started happening about 2 weeks ago.

 

i had similar problem due to firefox browser. there was some bug there.