Most likely it is your fans that are covered with dust.
You need to take off the cover of your tower and blow the dust out.
There are 2 fans, one on the motherboard and the other on the power supply which blows air out the back.
They sell duster air cans or it you have an air compressor.
You may want to use a pencil or something to hold the fans while you blow on them to prevent overspin.
Also grab the case to discharge static electricity before reaching inside.
I hope it's not your harddrive spinning up like a cd drive does. That would be a bad sign and I'd start backing up everything important before it starts clicking and shortly thereafter will fail.

You can run ChkDsk and scan your hard drive and repair all kinds of errors, including ones you don't even know you have.
Start, Run and type CHKDSK.

Have you checked your Scheduled Tasks to see if you have it set to run at lot of tasks... Or perhaps you've installed a program that runs all the time???

Rita

Go to your Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) and look at CPU use at the bottom of the window that opens. If you're only playing solitaire and your Task Manager shows a high level of activity (like greater than 10%) that doesn't drop down after a few seconds, then something is running in the background. That something could be as innocent as programs that don't need to be running that automatically start up when you turn on your computer, or it could be as nasty as a virus or botnet that has infected your computer.

Here is a link that might be useful: Botnet definition

Wow, interesting article. Didn't really understand it, but sounds scary.

Jane

New computer this year with a DSL hookup, also new, ran a lot like yours does. All the programs on the computer keep sending information back to the individual companies and they send back update information. We downloaded a few games and lots of activity till I dropped the programs or stopped the computer from starting them at startup.

Thanks to all for your help. I will try all tips given.
Trin

Jayne-
In a nutshell, use of a botnet is a way for someone to remotely invade and utilize people's computers for their purposes. These things run in the background on your computer and do stuff like send out spam or porn, and provide extra storage capacity to this person. That's why, if you've got a lot of background activity that you're not responsible for, it could be because your computer has been compromised/infected and is getting used, without your knowledge.

That's why I wonder about all those 'remote services' that are listed in msconfig. Remote Access, remote procedure, volumn shadow. Seems strange to me.
Luckily my machine is always at a low % except when something is running when it's supposed to be.

Jane