Foolestroupe -

If your laptop is running Vista (and maybe if it's Win7?) your processor will run at around 100% for the first month or so while Win Explorer "indexes" the drive "so you'll be able to search faster."

It took about 3 months (on 24/7) for my first Vista machine to "finish indexing C:\" (with about 185GB on it at the time) and it "updates" every time you save something.

You can change the default to not index, but if you do it has to "unindex" the whole drive, which will saturate your processor for about as long as it took to index it. Every file on an indexed drive/folder apparently has to be "tagged" to show that it's included in the index, or "untagged" if you change to not index.

The sad part of it is that Vista Search doesn't work at all so far as I can determine. I can copy a file name from Win Explorer and paste it into the search box, search only in the folder that the file is in, and Vista can't find it - but it will return 5,000 files totally unrelated to anything I told it find, even if the folder it claims to be searching in only has 800 files in it.

If I need to find a file, I use command prompt - DIR *.* /S > DIRC.txt - and open the text file (all 2,800 pages for one of my main folders) in Word, and use the Find in Word to get where the file is. It's quicker than the 3 or 4 hours Vista Search takes on the indexed drive to NOT FIND anything useful. It takes a lot longer on one of my unindexed drives, but it still doesn't find anything helpful.

There are a few other "background processes" that can eat a lot of cycles, but that's the most consistently annoying one I've found.

I have noticed that my last update of my Norton Suite has added a feature that notifies me if processor usage goes extremely high. It appears to trigger at about 95% in a single process. I suspect that's to help identify if a bot is using your machine to send SPAM, or something like that. The notice is "ineresting" but thus far it's always been my OCR program that's the cycle hog - and I already knew that. (The OCR is incredibly accurate, but the user interface appears to have been designed by some third grade class at a public school in a disadvantaged neighborhood that didn't have computers.)

John