Dad's computer aint doin too well

60 is a lot.
All you need are two firewalls, one software (XP is fine) and one hard (router).
Norton (rhymes with junk and I have it) takes up quite a bit of resources.
You have to look at each process that's running, feed each into Google and see what it does.

Also type "msconfig" into "run" on your desktop and see what you have in Start-Up that you can remove.

Running 60+ proc's at one time is overloading his cpu, and im pretty sure that atleast 85% of them are not necessary, also having multiple firewalls is not necessary as one will work just fine. Also sounds as if your dad needs a memory upgrade. But not knowing the full spec's its hard to speculate whats going on.

EDIT: RM beat me.

I agree with almost everything that you have recieved advice on except for the mutiple firewalls they are going to do anything other than check for collisions constantly and maybe those firewalls are keeping his connection going. Without the specs it is speculation but I will give it a try.
1. How long has it been since he took of the case and cleaned inside it?
2. Are all of his fans running?
3. Does the CPU seem to be running hot? I would check around the fins of the heatsink when the case is opened. It seems to me that its just running HOT...!!! Because it needs cleaned out.
4. The way you discribe it it is a cooling problem shutting down and starting back up.
5. Or there could be a failure depending on how much RAM that has been installed maybe the RAM is failing?

There is no software needed to keep a network alive. If you have a router that serves as a DHCP server and the computers have DHCP client software running, the network always knows where to send things. Actually DHCP isn't even needed if you assign IP addresses to each computer. I run a lot of things and even so, I am only running 51 processes.

Specs are as follows :

Pentium 4
2.40 Ghz
512 mb RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 5500

EDIT: I forgot to add, on his (the main) computer, the incoming network connection goes through the modem. There is a LAN Card on each of our computers that are connected by a cross-cable which is around 20m long. We don't have a wireless connection or a router. Also, deleting startup programs from msconfig will not be accepted by the system because it always reboots, and then tells him that he cannot run a selective startup, and must revert to the default, for reasons unknown to us.

Thank you for your help 😉

Try unplugging all the network and modem cables and see if the system lags. If not then its a conflict with your network set-up and investing in a network specialist might be a good option. I used to be an engineer for Sun Microsystems and I hated the networking training. So hard to learn it all.

Now, I understand. Your father's computer is running the (in)famous Microsoft Home Network.

The trouble is, that it doesn't explain the problem because that system isn't terribly CPU or memory intensive.

Start the taskmanager, make a note of how much RAM is in use and the average CPU useage. Report that here. Switch to the processes view, get a screenshot and post it. Maybe we can figure out what is causing the problem.

Also, you may want to go directly from the modem. Do not bypass anything. I think that you will find out that the home network may be the problem. Lynksys makes a mighty good router and it isn't very expensive. You can also get a router that has a firewall for a few bucks more.

I hope that we are helping and no confusing you.

crosscheck9, i can't help you on the Home Networking thing as i don't have much experience in networking. But buying a router in the future would greatly reduce the headaches for you and your dad.

Everyone assumes you are either on DSL or cable modem. Please confirm that.

If that is the case, I agree get a broadband router and scrap the home network. Linksys is insanely easy to set up and is very reliable. The only other thing you will have to replace is that crossover cable with a standard ethernet (5e or 6) cable.

Still, I'd like to see screenshots of those processes.

We are using a broadband satellite connection.

I hope you guys get this link before it expires. It is a MS Word document containing the photos of the processes etc...I hope something can be made out of it. I also took shots of Peformance...I hope this is what you need. Thanks 😉

http://download.yousendit.com/0B6167EC6149082E

You have a process running named dfrgfat.exe eating between 14 and 34% of the CPU It is part of the Diskkeeper defragmentation program.

A total of 49% of CPU time is being used, and on a system with 512 MB of RAM, you are using 550 MB which means stuff always has to be swapped to the hard drive and back into memory, which is guaranteed to slow a computer down..

If all that stuff needs to be run, you definitely need more RAM.

Here I have a tool that let's you explore processes.
Download here:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/jd2k79
It says who uses the process, it's full name, cpu usage, and more...
Usually, There should be only one software for your networking, and so Only one process.