I have noticed my laptops performance getting choppier. From the picture you can see that the cpu usage keeps spiking, and all I doing was looking at a few websites in firefox. I use avast and malware bytes, both haven’t found anything. I have 700mb of ram. Is this normal?
Browsing does cause the CPU to spike particularly on flash or graphic intense pages. I see no image so don’t know how high your CPU is running. If usage stays at or near 100% there is a problem. Which version of Windows? What is your processor speed?
Need more details. OS version? Processor type and speed? RAM? (is it shared with graphic?) Firefox version? What websites? How much tab were opened?
My personal opinion is : Rather than using Windows with 700MB RAM, I’d rather install Linux which released in 2008 or 2009 so your laptops can breathe a better air 
The image shows up for me. Running xp, celeron 1.8 ghz with 700 mb ddr2 ram. Just running regular sites, nothing with video.
700MB just isn’t enough ram. If you updated your computer to 2 gig,
you would probably think that you had just purchased a new computer.
( Your image shows up when I’m using my Google cr-48 otherwise it’s just an X )
(One of the reasons is that you’re using imageshack which is not a recommended site.)
Especially on a low end processor like a Celeron! 
The image shows up fine here.
When you sort all this out and compare the two chips side by side, it turns out that a Celeron and a Pentium 4 chip running at the same speed are different beasts. The smaller L2 cache size and slower bus speeds can mean serious performance differences depending on what you want to do with your computer. If all you do is check e-mail and browse the Web, the Celeron is fine, and the price difference can save you a lot of money. If you want the fastest machine you can buy, then you need to go with the Pentium 4 to get the highest clock speeds and the fastest system bus.http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question268.htm
When you get 100% spike check Applications to see what’s running, also check processes to see what’s using CPU.
MSN can cause high usage, also when computers not running take out whatever’s using the USB ports then replace.
You should like said get more ram.
CPU under load shouldn’t spike above 50% & 2% 4% on idle Rough guide