My father-in-law has a pentium II 450, 192MB ram and running XP. I kinow its not the best specs but hes been happy with it for the last year or so.

When running Paint shop pro 7 with an empty canvass the % used by it is about 2 or 3%.
However when running Livepix ( a very basic art prog) the cpu % is about 97%!! Again with an empty canvass.

The rest of the system is running fine because i formatted and re-installed XP 2 days ago.

I just cant make out why such a basic program is using so much processing power when it wasnt last week.

I have uninstalled Livepix twice but still the same problem.
He's not running any anti-virus software, as not much software has been put back on the drive yet.

He also hasnt installed service pack1 as i read on hear that one of the updates slows down the pc.

Any suggestions would be most welcome.
Thanks

Do you get the same result if you run teh same program on your own machine ?

If you are using Xp, has the problem always occured, or only when using Xp. Your system specs are below the minimum for Xp, however I have had systems run fine on similar specifications.

Some programs are not efficient in their use of memory. If the system memory is insufficient, windows will use virtual memory and page swap file. Graphics programs really require 256 mb especially on XP. If your hard drive is badly fragmented or is full, windows wont have a swap file to use.

In Windows XP, CTRL-ALT-DEL shows the Task Manager, which has a tab for Performance. It shows installed Physical memory as Total, with Available and System Cache. If the available plus System Cache adds to more than Total, the additional memory is in the Page File. The PageFile Usage is shown at Commit Charge, with current swap size being show as Total. PF Peak history and Limit are also shown.

One way to increase performance is to partition a section of the hard disk for use by virtual memory. If you dont, it will become fragmented and defrag wont help. Also, memory is cheap, so upgrade. You could also try a diagnostic tool like Sisoft Sandra and run a performance tune up, but this may not help if the problem lies in the Livepix program.

Thanks for the response guys.
I have checked Livepix on my machine and it also uses about 97% when i have a blank page.
As regards the other pc everything is the same setup as last week when it was running alot quicker.
Its so bad, if you draw a coloured box and move it, you can see it redrawing so slow!!

I'll have a look at the virtual memory, see if that helps.

Thanks for the help