computer not even 3 months old yet already problems : \

its been a very long time since i posted here please disregard my sig. thats the info of my old laptop and very very old desktop. oh yea and one more thing i foregot to add, my cpu is almost always at 100% usage, and my ram is mostly above 50% too, even when im just brousing the internet, even as im typing this.

There are many reasons that your machine is running slower and most of them are not hardware related. You can check the hardware by doing the Dell diagnostics when you boot.

 

If you have a Vista disk, you might try a reformat and clean install instead of restore. Try going over to the discussion groups at notebookreview.com. You will find a section on reloading your operating system without installing all of the bloatware. There are also many tips for speeding up Vista as well as other tips for tweaking your system. Your configuration indicates a system that should be plenty fast.

 

You can also make sure that your drivers are up to date and then there are free programs to improve your performance. All is not lost.

 

 

well other than hardware or malware/virus/other stuff like that, i just dont know what els could cause such a sudden drop in performance, it literally went from super fast to super slow overnight. and i have virus/malware protection that came with the computer, Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security, its up to date and the scans come up empty(altho all of my experence with the virus etc... removal programs has been terrible, i had a nasty virus on my old laptop that not one of over 10 different programs could do anything to, even spent money on what should have been the "top programs" like norton and stop sign, i think its all a big joke)

 

and when i try doing diagnostics the only one i can find is for memory, and if this is hardware related i think its more the processor than anything els. but im really starting to think its some kind of virus, does anyone know of any protection programs that actually work?

 

ahh foreget it ill just clean install, if its not fixed then ill know for sure its hardware.

 

 

When is the lest time you defragmented?  I was having the same issues as you with my 2 month old XPS M1330 and I used AusLogics Disk Defrag regularly, but the single most helpful thing I did with crazy noticeable improvements was defragmenting my boot files.

 

run command.exe

 

and then type defrag c: -b ( I think that's it - somebody correct me if I'm wrong)

 

I was shocked at how much it helped me particularly with the vista startup time.  

 

Aside from that, cleaning up your startup files for programs you don't need helps tremendously.  I use CCleaner for that.

 

I was going to reformat like you, but now I have it running better than before, believe it or not; which is great because reinstalling everything is a PIA.

 

Hope this helps. 

I have had the same problem. I have contacted the amazingly useless tech support 7 times because my XPS runs at 100% CPU Usage. It takes forever to do anything and tonight I can not even use. I am so angry right now I could scream, hence the reason I am not calling tech and have sent an email. They have tried taking it back to the factory settings and it still won't function properly. I even had a tech support guy tell me yesterday that I shoudlremove my didgital camera stuff because that could be what was causeing the problems. Bologne that has only been on there for a week and the computer has performed porrly since day one! My recommnedation is to send it back before the 21 days are up. Thye are unable to fix this issue.

message deleted, going to start a new thread since its a completely different problem.