How do I make my CPU usage less? It's really high?

Memory usage and CPU usage are totally unrelated. Memory usage is the amount of RAM a process is using; CPU usage is the percentage of the time the process is actually running. It's kind of like the difference between the gas gauge and the speedometer. A single task taking up less than a megabyte could use 100% of the CPU.

But that doesn't answer the question of what is using it. Try this: In Task Manager, click the CPU column header to sort the entries on that value lowest to highest, then click it again to flip the order from highest to lowest. That should show you who's using the resource.

Good luck.

ram usage is not equal to cpu usage. they are 2 entirely independant measurements. both valid but they don't directly affect each other. you need to look at what programs you have running that could be doing that. do you have lots of stuff on your system tray (thats the area with all the icons in the lower left)? If so, you might want to use msconfig (click start, then run, then type "msconfig" in the box and hit enter in xp, or click start, type msconfig into the search box and hit enter on vista or 7) to turn off startup items you don't need. generally in msconfig, you really don't need to have anything in the startup tab running at startup. It can all be started manually by you whenever you want that particular program.

Another thing to check is make sure you don't have any viruses or malware, running an antivirus scan and a scan with an antimalware tool such as malwarebytes (an excellent free program) would probably be a good idea

could be a program is running unseen. i would scan for malware in safemode. and you shouldn't have more then 50 running processes. many peices of software will use system processes to run, called svchost.exe. might get a start up manager.

Look in task manager and it should help if you find out what your looking for