Please solve my computer woes

[ZombieFriedNuts]

Does anybody know of any software that will monitor the CPU usage I know there are things out there but for the life of me I cant remember their names, I’m trying to find out what is wrong with my parents computer and my dad wont accept that it's 7 years old and rubbish to begin with.
In fact I want to test everything on it and its running windows 98 if that’s any help.
And dear god a 56k modem is slow when you have just come back from 2MB broadband.:thumbsdown:

[Lemur]

Here's the smallest one I could find, a 29k utility (http://www.dirfile.com/cpu_usage_viewer.htm) that gives you snapshots of CPU usage.

[ZombieFriedNuts]

Ok thanks for that but I may not be needing it after all I did a bit of research and it turns out that this computer only has 500mhz of processing power so that could be why its so slow.

[naut]

Ok thanks for that but I may not be needing it after all I did a bit of research and it turns out that this computer only has 500mhz of processing power so that could be why its so slow.
A new computer may be in order here.

[caravel]

Does anybody know of any software that will monitor the CPU usage I know there are things out there but for the life of me I cant remember their names, I’m trying to find out what is wrong with my parents computer and my dad wont accept that it's 7 years old and rubbish to begin with.
In fact I want to test everything on it and its running windows 98 if that’s any help.
And dear god a 56k modem is slow when you have just come back from 2MB broadband.:thumbsdown:

I think your dad must be my boss. Does he by any chance also own an entire fleet of about 20 ancient IBM Thinkpads, with 166MHz Pentium MMX CPUs, and 32MB of RAM worth "£360 each"?

Seriously though, why do you want to monitor the CPU usage? Is it thermal monitoring you're after? If so you're probably out of luck. Is it an AMD or an Intel? What are the problems, can you describe the symptoms?

[ZombieFriedNuts]

It’s just so dam slow and my dads complaining but he claims that he dosent needs a new computer.
I just wanted to check how much the processing power my virus checker took up when we weren’t doing anything
Symptoms when surfing the net when I scroll down the page the bit bellow the doesn’t appear straight away it kind of takes a while to realize that it is supposed to be their and all you get is white for a couple of seconds
And also when I open a file on the hard drive it takes an age to actually do anything
And don’t forget the 10+ min startup
o and its an AMD athlon K7 proccesor

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

Depending on your motherboard, you could get a better processor for almost free.

[caravel]

It’s just so dam slow and my dads complaining but he claims that he dosent needs a new computer.
I just wanted to check how much the processing power my virus checker took up when we weren’t doing anything
Symptoms when surfing the net when I scroll down the page the bit bellow the doesn’t appear straight away it kind of takes a while to realize that it is supposed to be their and all you get is white for a couple of seconds
And also when I open a file on the hard drive it takes an age to actually do anything
And don’t forget the 10+ min startup
o and its an AMD athlon K7 proccesor

A 500Mhz athlon? That would be an original "Argon" core, on a slot A daughterboard, rather like the old slot 1 Pentium2/3 SEC cartridges. You may be able to get hold of a 700MHz "Argon" core Athlon or even a 1GHz "Pluto", "Orion" or "Thunderbird" Athlon to bang in there to get some extra performance out of it. The latter types would be ideal, especially the Thunderbird, but I'm not sure whether your motherboard would support them. The "Palomino", "Thoroughbred A", "Thoroughbred B" and "Barton" cores won't be supported by your motherboard at all so don't bother with those. The problem with Win9x is that it multitasks poorly, which is why background processes are slowing the system down. Can you give details of what programs are running in the background? Preventing alot of unnecessary junk from loading at startup can make a massive difference.

[DukeofSerbia]

Right click on toolbar and click on Task Manager. After that click on performance. You will see PF Usage and CPU Usage.