user4413: I have the Bitcoin Client running on my laptop, it is up to date and now fully synchronised, but it is running the CPU at almost 100% and so makes doing anything else extremely slow. Is this normal?
Whilst it was 'synchronising with the network' it was doing the same but I assumed it was because synchronising with the network used up a lot of processing power, but it does the same now - is this likely to always be same or have I done something wrong in the set up?  (my laptop has 2GB memory, has 2.20GHz processor and running on windows vista)
Many thanks in advance

user1409: For the initial synchronization with the Bitcoin network, you may see elevated CPU and disk usage. During this synchronization process, the client downloads from other nodes in the network each block. The client verifies each block itself. 
Given that you're running Vista, your computer is probably at least five years old. Its performance may be impacted more than more modern computers.
You may want to consider using the boostrap.dat method of synchronizing more  quickly and with less performance impact. This method will synchronize the first ~216k blocks much more quickly. Once imported, your client will resume normal synchronization. Please ensure that you are using Bitcoin-Qt 0.8.0 or newer in order to avoid problems with this method.

user1307: The normal bitcoin client should not use more than a few percentages, if not even zero, from your CPU.
What client are you running? The Bitcoin-Qt client? Did you ever enabled the "generate bitcoins" option? I'm not sure if it's in the Bitcoin-Qt client's settings, but you could've enabled it in your bitcoin.conf file.
Maybe you should post your bitcoin.conf file. Or just make sure it doesn't have generate=true in it.

4413: <p>I have the Bitcoin Client running on my laptop, it is up to date and now fully synchronised, but it is running the CPU at almost 100% and so makes doing anything else extremely slow. Is this normal?</p>

<p>Whilst it was 'synchronising with the network' it was doing the same but I assumed it was because synchronising with the network used up a lot of processing power, but it does the same now - is this likely to always be same or have I done something wrong in the set up?  (my laptop has 2GB memory, has 2.20GHz processor and running on windows vista)</p>

<p>Many thanks in advance</p>
 1409: <p>For the initial synchronization with the Bitcoin network, you may see elevated CPU and disk usage. During this synchronization process, the client downloads from other nodes in the network each block. The client verifies each block itself. </p>

<p>Given that you're running Vista, your computer is probably at least five years old. Its performance may be impacted more than more modern computers.</p>

<p>You may want to consider using the <a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145386.0" rel="nofollow">boostrap.dat</a> method of synchronizing more  quickly and with less performance impact. This method will synchronize the first ~216k blocks much more quickly. Once imported, your client will resume normal synchronization. Please ensure that you are using Bitcoin-Qt 0.8.0 or newer in order to avoid problems with this method.</p>
 1307: <p>The normal bitcoin client should not use more than a few percentages, if not even zero, from your CPU.</p>

<p>What client are you running? The Bitcoin-Qt client? Did you ever enabled the "generate bitcoins" option? I'm not sure if it's in the Bitcoin-Qt client's settings, but you could've enabled it in your <code>bitcoin.conf</code> file.</p>

<p>Maybe you should post your <code>bitcoin.conf</code> file. Or just make sure it doesn't have <code>generate=true</code> in it.</p>
