Dell Laptop CPU Buried at 100%

[Omniman]

So a friend of mine gave me there laptop to work on. It was running Vista and even the slightest application installations would bury the cpu at 100% and it would get stuck at 100% for a good 30 minutes after the programs was done installing. Anyhow, so I figured I would put 7 on it and it was most likely just Vista being lame or just toast from a possible virus. So I put 7 on it and the first batch of 7 updates took 2 hours to install. Now the hardware in this laptop has a Core 2 Duo T7500 with 2GB of ram and a nice Nvidia gpu in it which blows my mind as to why it's having such troubles! I figured maybe a BIOS update would do it but still no change in it's behavior. What could possibly be screwing this thing up on even a fresh install of 7?

[UberGerbil]

Have you drilled down to see what process is consuming so much CPU? (DPC, perhaps?) Have you looked at the HD configuration (in both the BIOS and Windows) to confirm it is in the fastest DMA mode it supports? (Windows will downshift through the DMA modes all the way to PIO as it encounters disk errors, so seeing something like that happen on a fresh install implies some kind of hardware problem with the HD or its connections, assuming the BIOS is set correctly).

[Darkmage]

Does Dell still do that hard disk partitioning to create a backup partition for anything it remotely deems important? Perhaps shoveling all that stuff between disks is eating up CPU cycles.

[potatochobit]

laptops break, bro
you need to run some benchmarks; test the memory, test the cpu and test the hard drive