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Derek Martin writes: | ... | There /are/ ways to tweak Windows XP to use less CPU power; one of | them is to turn off menu fading. If you search the web, you'll find | others. I came across such a list once, but fortunately my hardware | is fast enough that it's not an issue... so I didn't pay much | atention. One thing to look at that's a problem on all systems: Browsers tend to come with lots of cpu-eating features turned on. I've seen a lot of problems with browsers using 98% of the cpu, and if I'm using several browsers (for testing web pages), all of them can be trying to consume all of the cpu. You might want to hunt through all your browsers' config stuff and disable java, javascript, and any other sort of scripting, and only turn them on for pages that need them. Also, look for the controls for those active images (which tend to be called something different on every browser), and tell it to play an image only once or not at all. If you can turn off blinking and those silly "marquee" scrolling text things, do so. You'll be amazed at how a browser's cpu usage drops when you do these things. I have collections of browsers on my machines, and I'm often running all of them to test web pages. This can be a serious problem at times if I've left some browser activity features running. Finding all the controls in all the browsers can take time. And somethimes an upgrade with move the controls, so you waste time discovering where they hidden (and renamed) the controls. I never have found any controls that disable the automatic reloading of pages by sites like news.google.com, but this is usually not much of a problem, because their refresh rate is usually low. I've thought of making a web page listing all the known cpu-hog features within various browsers, with instructions on how to turn them on and off. Collecting such info and trying to keep it up to date could be a lifespan-hogging operation, though.
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