About two weeks ago, while using Adobe audition, trying to record some tracks, the audio started lagging like crazy.. gradually getting slower and slower like the effect of a battery dying. and I was getting mouse lag, and my cpu usage was like 70% to 80 %.. and now ever since then, I cant even do any gaming, getting 25 - 40 fps in COD4 on lowest settings.. and sumtimes when just browsing on the net, it will start lagging at random times, getting mouse lag, and youtube will play all "jumpy"

I have done virus scans, tested for spyware, even did a defrag.. and nothing seems to be helping.

I'm not blaming Adobe audition for the cause of the problem, its just to give you an idea of how i noticed the problem the first time.

When my PC is idle, the CPU usage is below 3%, but the second I start running applications, the usage will rise way higher than it normally would.

This happened before about two months ago, i formatted and reinstalled windows, and then it was fine, but has now started again.

Interesting problem. Make sure you have applied every single Windows Update patch available, it's possible it could be a bug in the operating system.

Check your startup entries using msconfig or Autoruns and remove all the unnecessary ones, this may help.

Go into the task manager and see what's using all the resources.