Hello awalt,
You are running 7 projects on 4 cores on a laptop! No wonder you have cooling problems and performance issues. This means that you have set some parameters for this laptop only instead of using the website to set general preferences. My suggestion is that you experiment setting your preferences to run WCG 50% of the time (1 second on, 1 second off) to minimize heat issues and set your maximum projects to 2 (25% of virtual CPUs). If that is good (heat, noise, performance) then tomorrow try 3 projects and 38% of virtual CPUs. The most a laptop with 4 cores should ever run is 4 projects (50% of virtual CPUs). After all, only desktops have the heavy cooling required by hyperthreading which lets you run 5 or more projects on a quad-core. My guess is that even 4 projects will prove to be too much for your laptop.

Incidentally, Task Monitor should show CPU percentages adding up to 99-100% for your current heavy load of WCG projects. If the percentage sum is notably less, is the remainder in System Idle or some other process?

Lawrence

Added: I just read your post above this one. Remember, you may have system tasks running under the Administrator account which will not show up on PerfMon, which is why you need to add up CPU percentages and System Idle to make sure that the sum is almost 100%. If not, then where is the CPU time going?

Added even later: So reinstalling seems to have worked? Please ignore my suggestions, but please check that there is no unexplained activity on your laptop.

Thanks for all the suggestions. When I was checking CPU usage I had all threads showing, including WCG ones.

This laptop ran fine for a long time with the number of projects at 7 or 8, if I bring up perfmon it shows 8 CPU windows. Not sure why now it started to have problems.

I changed max CPUs to 4 (50%), it seemed to be running ok with 7 of 8 but fan was running. It was and remains at 60% of the time.

Thanks for the tips, I'll watch and tune as appropriate based on your comments!

Rebooted, within about 15 minutes the laptop is unusable. I think it must be one of the projects. I'll check back in a couple of hours, I need to uninstall this asap if I am going to get this computer to be able to do anything. Thanks if you have any ideas!

No indexing, turned off anti virus completely. Thanks for the suggestions though! Could it be trying to do something with GPU and since there is none it's messing up? I really think it's a particular project that is running, but that's just a hunch with no reasoning behind it :-)

When BOINC is processing some tasks, what happens if you 'Suspend' ('Snooze' from the System Tray, 'Suspend' from within the BOINC task manager) BOINC - does the CPU usage go right back down and things speed up, or is the machine still as slow as molasses?