Hello, As the first reply said, the fans are trying to cool the CPU. You have to have good airflow to get good cooling. Here are some checks thoughts:
1) Are you sitting the laptop on a soft surface that can block the cooling ports? blanket, table with a table cloth, bed, lap?
2) Is the cooling areas blocked with dust? Use compressed air to blow all the ports, fins, crevices out. If you can figure out the air flow, blow the dust out in the opposite direction.
3) Try one of those laptop cooling pads.
4) You may have more then one fan inside and one is not working.
bmadams

i have a emachines [gateway supported] model# mx4625. the os is windows xp. when i alt-control-delete; sometimes it shows my cpu as 100% and then rapidly jumps down to 0% and then goes up to like 2%.

doesn't mean its not getting hot just because its not overloaded ,can of compressed air ,blow out the fan /heatsinc from the outside best you can ,might help i have laptop here that gets so hot the video goes crazy,blaptop freezes but its neither the fan bot the cpu ,so there is other things that cause heat buildup also

would this memory work?

http://shop.kingston.com/partsinfo.a...&promo=prcgrbr