Hi,

I recently purchased a laptop (2 core duo, 1 GB ram) with Vista. Over the last week or so I have noticed suspicious behaviour with the CPU, Memory and Disk activity spiking and maxing out. It even affects mouse behaviour causing jumpy mouse (optical) movement.

In the Resource manager you can see the spikes with just one Firefox instance running with two tabs.

I have scanned the computer with StopZilla, and AVG (free edition) and while I did find several Trojans initially, it now scans clean.

Before I give up and reformat with Ubuntu, is there anything I should check for?

getting a good anti-virus program to stop viruses and keep the computer clean.

and

stoppping unwanted programs running in the backround that you really dont need and it just takes up tons of memory space and CPU usage. like the sidebar, you dont really need it, but it does take up lots of CPU and memory, i think around 20,000 k

hope i answered your question