So I've been doing a lot of compressing video for web use, and have been using Windows Media Encoder because it's free and produces high quality, small files.

My problem is that it is still slow, even on my new system, and I don't know if it's a limit of my system or what.

Here's the deal, while the convertor is working, I'm able to open any number of programs, browse the web, check email, listen to MP3's, etc, with no noticeable slowdown of the converting process. Yet the program it's self says it's using 100% of the CPU power. That doesn't sound like I could do all that other stuff. I certainly couldn't on my old machine.

Is there any way to make the process go faster? Anyone here familiar with Windows Media Encoder?

It's possible to write a program which multitasks well, but also churns really hard if you're not doing anything else on the PC.

Note that I said "possible". It's not common to find one, though.

If the Windows Media Encoder is grabbing 100 percent of the processor when you're idle, it's sounds like it's doing the best it can do. The fact that you can surf in the foreground without a serious performance hit is a bonus. Actually, I'm surprised to learn that Microsuck was actually able to write a program that multitasks well (considering major parts of the user interface can't even do that after all these years).

It seriously does. I suppose I really should be gratefull.

Of course, you need the processor power to do so. On my old 550MHz I had to leave it on overnight to let it work because it was unusable during the process. Now I can't seem to do anything to slow it down! Although I haven't tried firing up GTA3