Win 7 CPU Usage

I would install System Mechanic. It does a good job of cleaning up a machine to get performance back where it should be. It also keeps the machine running properly.

That sounds like a lot of processes unless you have ten or fifteen programs open and running. Mine runs about 60 processes when I only have a couple of different browsers open, a graphics program, and an email program.

It's very likely there are only a couple programs/processes that are hogging the CPU. Find them and kill them and see what happens.

You also might run "msconfig" to see what programs are running at start-up.

Which processes are using up the highest CPU cycles?

My win 7 with just FF running has 109 processes but only 3 percent CPU.
That is fairly normal. No fan noise.
Things that might be going on: Indexing of files for searchs (should only be for a while).
Virus Scan which could be for a few hours depending on which one you have installed. Also any other programs which do a scan of the hard drive.
Is there hard drive usage? see lights?
Win 7 just had a update. Is that being done automatically on your system?

In task manager, go to the Processes tab. Click the button at the bottom to Show processes from all users. Then click the CPU column heading. That should sort the processes from high to low cpu usage. If it doesn't, click it once more. Now you'll be able to see which processes are using your CPU.

Nope. Number of processes is not too much out of normal. On my Win 8.1 I currently have about 60 with just IE open. The 60-70% CPU usage is quite high for a essentially idle PC. Check how many apps are started when you first start the PC. There should be a Startup tab in the task manager which will show you what loads automatically. You can disable the ones you don't want started but be careful some are needed.