cpu usage help

hey i have an asus g1s, i only use it once in awhile to type up papers, and i when i go home i bring it to play games at my friends house. I just noticed though the first time i was playing games this past labor day weekend the cpu usage. i even look on the side on my desktop with the cpu usage meter it ranges from 40-70% cpu usage, and i have barley anything running. i have avast antivirus running, and a webpage open thats it. i get about 40-70% cpu usage. I have microsoft office 2007 installed, adobe creative suite3, steam, and thats about it. If anyone has any suggestionsthat would be great. i uninstalled a bunch of the asus bloatware, like live update already, i still have multiframe, but i end processed that, and the cpu usage is still high. Please help, right now im at college so its not a big deal i just use it to type reports, but once i go home on weekends to play games this will be annoying, i dont want my laptop i just bought a month ago to burn up because the cpu gets to 80-90% when running counter-strike 1.6


also have one other problem ill just throw out there if anyone knows, is there anyway to see a log of what was downloaded or installed on the harddrive, because my hard is about 140 GB and went down to about 110 after installing everything, but ive been uninstalling and installing adobe creative suite to get it to work correcly, but now my harddrive is at 98GB, yes i installed it into the same folder, this would be an extreme problem if this keeps happening but, the remaining 90 GB is enough for me, its just if anyone knows of a log history i can access that would be great.

 

is it constantly at 40-70? or is it just bursts that it will go really high then lower back down again?

 

Check the application section of Ctrl-Alt-Del for what process(es) are eating the 40-70%, and you'll find the culprit. Something is running in the background on you, you wouldn't have baseline C2D activity that would do that.

There may be some temp files that aren't clearing out with your repeated installs. The uninstall may also be leaving some folders behind elsewhere on the HD, hard to say; that would explain the slowly decreased space over repetitions. After uninstall go searching and delete anything that shows up under Adobe, that might help.

 

Yep, look for a folder called "Setup Files" in the adobe installation, Adobe products are huge chunks of blot and to live up to their name, they even leave their full installation files on the HDD.

You can apply a heuristic search to the other installed software for this kind of stuff, as well. Just make sure you don't delete something that is needed. If in doubt, first move it to a different folder instead of deleting,a nd try to start up the program.

Other things that I check (in XP though):

- Temp files in the user folder, as well as the system (Windows) folder
- Temporary internet files
- Restore points: I'm pretty much sure that Vista has this feature, and your multiple installations and uninstallations have produced a lot of restore points (because one is automatically created after each such event). Perhaps this is your biggest space-eater. Try disabling and reenabling system restore or whatever its name is in Vista, that does the trick in XP


As to the 40-70% CPU use, I agree that you should check the CPU usage of the processes in the Task Manager (hoping Vista has smth like that) and like that find out what's eating up the CPU.