Hello.

I have a year old laptop, 1.7ghz, 448mb Ram, windows xp home edition. Its not really had a problem like this until few weeks ago. First of all, I used to connect to the internet through an ethernet cable, but now the laptop doesnt seem to recognise the cable for some reason. I dont know if the cable is faulty or not, I doubt it is. So now I am forced to use the wireless to connect to the router.

Its around when I switched to the wireless I think the problem appeared. For some reason my laptop is awfully slow, I usually run firefox and itunes most of the time, and now these two programs hog up the cpu. I downgraded my firefox to 1.7 and it seemed to have helped a little bit, but still the laptop struggles every now and then. I'm looking at the windows task manager right now with only mozilla open. The processes tells me that mozilla is using around on average 7cpu, most of the cpu is in the system idle process. But when I look at the performance tab, the cpu usage is constantly hovering around 70%. With Itunes open it is around 100%. Sometimes the svchost.exe uses a lot of cpu, but this isnt all the time.

Now, not only has my computer gone really slow but the internet has as well around the same time. I first thought it was the area I am in since we get awful speed anyway, but it seems that my flatmates have good speed, so it mustnt be down to the internet provider. We pay for 20mb internet speed, and it takes me 20 seconds to open up google. When I am downloading, it does around 6kbps. Sometimes it can get faster, but most of the time it is really slow, and recently I have been having trouble connecting my wireless to the router.

This is really bugging me and if anyone could shed a light on this I'll be grateful. Thanks in advance.

No one knows how to solve this problem? The lack of response is suggesting so, and I wanted to see if anyone has an idea on this before I either get professional help, or just reboot my laptop.

Any help would be appreciated.

First off, itunes is bad for ur laptop as it doesnt have that much memory anyways. It will make ur cpu touch the limits constantly. I ll stick with other players rather than itunes. Now the ethernet cable issue could be ur network card failure, or it might just need uptodate drivers. But have you tried using alternate cable to see if that works? that might help you diagnose the issue if it is the faulty cable. Now the wireless internet issue could be anything as i dont have too much experienc on wireless internet, although i have heard that the signal strength(bandwidth) is affected in wireless connections. But form a 20mb connection to a 6kb is a bit too much of a tumble.

PS i would definitely get more memory on it if i were you mate