So, I have my main rig, which I didn't spend a dollar on, Running on an AMD Athlon Dual-Core CPU clocked at 3GHZ. I can't even do things like use google earth without the CPU crapping itself, and the program looking very choppy. So, here are my options. I'm kind of stingy, so I'm looking to spend the least amount of money possible here. I have a triple core AMD Phenom Clocked at 2.2 GHz and can run google earth great with no PROBLEMS, which is in a rig in my garage, or there is an AMD Phenom II Quad Core CPU clocked at 3.2 GHz. I am wondering if spending the money is worth it or should I just stick to the CPU from the garage rig. Any info is appreciated! Choppy is likely video card or integrated video related. I have run google earth on a single-core Sempron 140 2.7 Ghz with no problems once I was using a Geforce 9400GT video card with latest drivers, instead of the integrated Radeon 3000 GPU.

Assuming your running on say 4GB RAM and your not bottlenecked due to low memory, I feel your issue is GPU related with that computer. What do you have for a video card in it or integrated GPU?

If your CPU is going to 100% for both cores you have something wrong with the software of your build, possibly malware etc. So a clean install should fix for that. You mentioned you got it free, someone else may have gotten rid of it due to lag.

Many things can cause lag. GPU is the first thing to check into. Next is temperatures to make sure that its not a thermal condition that is making for the lag. Then verifying the health of RAM, Hard Drive, and Main Board. Verifying health of main board can be tricky to determine, but sometimes you can visually see problems such as capacitors around the CPU usually that are leaking electrolyte and causing ripple and other issues on what should be clean power to voltage noise sensitive components like CPU and RAM.

If you havent installed clean to this build since acquiring it, then installing the OS clean to it would be a good direction to GO to verifying that the system is clean and not riddled with swiss cheese data from past infections that were cleaned up but scars to data structure and files can remain that affect performance.Thanks Dave for the reply,

I just got a new MSI Nvidia Geforce GT 710 in the MAIL today and after I installed it, almost all my problems went away. It is most likely because I was running an AMD Radeon X1900, and that was making a mess on every program, and YES I have a clean install of windows 10 Pro on a SSD. I think trying to use that GPU was pretty sad on my part, just because it was huge I thought it was cool and ran better than my other SMALLER card. Thanks for replying!Glad to help and save you money!