100% CPU Usage Causing Choppy Frame-rates?

for about 2 months now, every time my laptop does something involving graphics (usually playing games or watching a video on Internet, or anything involving flash), i'll notice that my cpu usage spikes to 100%, which causes slowdown, i.e.: gameplay/videos will be slow and choppy, sometimes freezing for a few seconds to a few minutes before resuming. it usually does this in intervals, i'll have a few seconds of normal gameplay/video and then the freezing. considering that this also happens when i play offline games, i'm suspected that it's my graphics card that is the culprit.for reference, i'm using an ati radeon hd 3200 graphics display adapter on my laptop. i've tried updating the driver not too long ago, which ended up installing the ati ccc, but the problem still persists. i haven't had this before and the games/videos used to work fine.looking in the task manager, i see that its the application that i'm running that's hogging the cpu (either firefox for Internet/flash or even stuff like tf2 and maplestory).