make sure under the performance tab, that you have "search" or "file indexing" turned off. and all of the "pretty" features in ur GUI, those are the shadow apps that eat up usage in explorer.exe. and i would also reccomend taking all the acer installed crap off of that laptop. as far as virus protection goes, i use and reccomend panda's new "cloud" antivirus, its free, and is hosted on their servers, some viruses actually mess with your installed stand alone virus scanning apps to hide themselves, but id say your cpu usage is directly related to file indexing. and you do have your wow folders symlinked correct? if your running out of one folder, a c2d has a few problems with that, (i use to run a duo b4 i went to multiple pc's)