Are you sure you have 'quit' or 'exit'-ed every unneccesary background process. For example the little icons near the windows clock(bottom right). Keep them as few as possible. No need to have like MSN eat up CPU cycles. Winamp probably eats up alot too. But there are also some running without a visible icon there. You can see which proccesses are running (in Win XP) by pressing ctrl-alt-delete and look at the processes tab. You can sort the list by pressing the CPU collumnheader to see which ones are most frequently run. But be carefull about killing them, some are required for a stable running windows. Search for their name and info on the web before actually stopping them. But sometimes I just risk it.
