System idle using up all my resources

Hello everyone, recently my compaq presario has been acting up from one day to another when i turned it on i would have issues where the touch would not function but after a few restarts it begins to work, and also normal windows xp processes like system idle/svchost/explorer begin to hog my resources from using 0 cpu to 70% cpu(and i mean 70% of the actual cpu not just the % its using compared to other processes). and when my laptop does start to stabilize if i try to open an kinda program IE or Firefox for example not only does it take a long time but the program itself begins to hog resources. Also my boot up time has well over doubled and the windows xp boot up sound also sounds a little crackly when it tries to play.

Anyone have any ideas what could be contributing to these issues, i was guessing some hardware issue but i cant really tell.

thank you

 

a lot of viruses and malware disguise themselves as svhost, boot in safe mode and do a virus scan to rule that out.

 

System idle process running at 99 CPU is normal, SVCHost or Explorer eating up all your CPU and/or Memory is not. As JCovelli suggested, you may want to scan for viruses. It could also be spyware, which you could try to remove with Spybot Search and Destroy and/or Ad-Aware. If the system is generally slowing down and programs are executing slowly, it might be a good time to do a complete reinstall.

 

Also try creating a new profile to see if it still doing it..

 

i ran my anti virus program(nod32) and ran in safe mode, nod32 found nothing and even in safe mode the laptop ran the same.