I must be losing my "touch"

[liljim]

Im currently fighting with a dell demension 2400 and im losing badly.This machine was brought to me with a virus on it.When it booted the cpu hit 100%,rendering it useless.So what i done was this, i removed the hdd and slaved it into my desktop.I scaned it with my virus scanner which found over 2700 files infected with PE_Parite.A (according to pc-cillin).I allowed it to clean the drive,put it back in the dell machine and had the same problem, cpu 100%.I then reinstalled windows by doing a simple format then clean install using the XP Home disk that was supplied with the machine.When it booted to a desktop for the first time...cpu 100%.I rebooted into safe mode...100%.Task manager showed that taskmanager itself was using over 50% and the rest was used by system.Assuming the possibility of remaning virus corruption, I wrote zero's to the drive,erasing everything.I repartitioned and reinstalled xp and on first boot...cpu 100%.

Im currently formatting again to try an install of XP Pro but im not feeling real hopeful.I searched around for answers all over the net and everything points to software probs or SP2 probs but there's nothing installed on this machine other than windows itself.If there's any suggestions..im all ears.

Truly stuck,
liljim

[liljim]

Just to add...the specs are:

P4 2.6
512 ddr ram

should be far from maxed out

[PCguy]

CPU at 100% usually means bad RAM. Try replacing the RAM if you have any laying around.

[liljim]

Tried different ram...same thing.However, i do have it straightened out.

I went through the bios and noticed that the HDD was set to UDMA.I turned off udma mode and all is well again.Now i just have to get everything reinstalled

[teststrips]

[Geekgirl]

[liljim]

[Restek]