If what you're saying is that your game's processes take up 99% of the CPU's time while it's being played - that sounds to me like your CPU isn't fast enough to handle the game. Does that make sense?

Like what's already been mentioned if a game is taking up 99% of your CPU when you play it (this seems unusual to me) then you probably would have to improve your processor to speed up how the game is played. When you buy a game look at it's system requirements and compare them to your own computer. If your computer is close to or below the minimum requirements then the game will be likely to run slowly (or in some cases not even work) on your PC. Processors can be expensive to upgrade, however, and it may be better value just to buy a new system, you should explore all options available to you. Another aspect that affects gameplay is your 'RAM' or random access memory. This basically along with your CPU affects the speed of what you can see on your screen and so usually a higher level RAM will speed up your computer performance when you are playing a game. However unfortunately if your CPU is not particularly powerful upgrading your RAM may not have any great effect. A simple way of speeding up games is closing all background applications so that the game is the sole programme running at the time. Going into the options for your game allows you to reduce the graphical quality which may also speed up the performance. If you could post your system specification along with the game you are playing I could probably help you further.

get a dual core cpu machine or try getting a video processor card so you take all the image processing off your cpu to that card.

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More RAM. Faster graphics card. Faster CPU. (Probably in that order of priority.)

Ok. If you look at your tak manager performance tab you want to look at the total Physical Memory box when you are playing. Is the amoutn of availible ram low? like.. real low.. i'm talking less then 25k. If so, then you probably need more ram. What kind of video card do you have and can you have? Is it a card with at least 256MB of ram? Is it a PCI-E? AGP? If your card is behind the curve upgrading that might help. How good is your processor? Is it old? What kind of socket is on your motherboard? If you want to upgrade your processor you need to know what motherboard you have in your system. Now.. about the game. What are your graphics setting at? Are they cranked all the way up on a fairly new game? Try toning them down and seeing if your performance improves. If the performance of the game actually bad? or you just worried about your processor. So here is my thoughts. On RAM: The likelyhood that ram will decrease your CPU usage is minimal. I doubt that is your problem unless the above condition on the available physical ram is the true. On Vid Card: A new video card will help you to increase the resolution and possibly off load some of the CPU work onto the newer better graphics processor. On CPU: Buying a dual core upgrade is basically pointless for gaming. duel cores rely on the game being able to parallel process which essentially none do. What games need are the biggest baddest single core they can get their hands on. Duel cores are great mind you and have many improvements over old chips besides just the duel core, but the "duel core" nature of it helps gamers very little. The Game: Most games try to grab as much power as possible to make the effects as smooth as possible all the time. Even some of the older games I play will put me darn near the 100% mark all the time. The games desire i8 to give you the best performance it can get it's hands on. I'm never surprised and rarely worried when I see a game running at 100% processor usage. Some games are just badly written. Take sony's new game vanguard. I tried that out last week and had to crank the graphics setting wayyyy down. This is on my machine which is a darn powerful gaming machine that i built 7 months ago. Even at the lower settings the game runs at 100% processor constantly. So what's the problem?? The problem is the software of the game is just bad, no hardware upgrade can fix that.

Ram and get a a game router.