Over the past few weeks my old laptop has started to struggle. I use it almost exclusively for streaming pandora at work and it has done that fine for years but now it has developed huge amounts of lag and stuttering during playback. the culprit seems to be a process called msmpeng.exe which is a core process of microsoft security essentials real-time protection. every minute or so it will spike to 80-90% CPU usage for about 10 seconds, and then chill back down for seemingly no reason. google hasnt been of any help. everyone seems to blame "conflicting programs" for the spikes in CPU usage. the problem is i hadnt changed anything in my configuration to cause a conflict. the system had been happily chugging along exactly as it was for years. after much bashing my head against the wall i even reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled windows XP and my programs to no avail. i added the msmpeng.exe process and its file location to MSEs exception list on someones suggestion of tail-chasing. and i have MSE set to limit CPU usage to 10% during scans (though this setting only applies to active scans). MSE is crippling my system! i originally installed MSE because this is an older laptop and its generally light on system resources. if i cant get this resolved, can anyone recommend another, free, light, anti-virus program?
