Re: 100% CPU Power - XP the Culprit, Not all These Different Causes & Fixes?

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"jcp370" <jcp370@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
"Rock" wrote:
"jcp370" wrote

>I have been experiencing periodic bouts where my pc slows down to a
> crawl and becomes virtually useless for at least a year, maybe more
> like 2. I open the Task Manager and note that my CPU usage has reached
> 100%. I have read several hundred posts and tried half as many fixes
> without success.

> What continues to amaze me, however, is that these posts and proposed
> fixes continue to target one particular program or add-on or villain
> (spyware or malware, etc.) as the cause. And hundreds & hundreds of
> individual offenders have been identified as the cause but the problem
> remains unresolved for a lot of people, including me. And although
> many posts claim success after implementing the various fixes, I'd be
> curious to see how long these fixes lasted because I had temporary
> success with a few of them. (And as an aside, spent a ton of money
> beefing up my anti-spyware/malware security when this was repeatedly
> identified as the culprit, only to experience no improvement at all.)

> Has no one had experience similar to mine? When my pc is in its "100%
> CPU usage mode", it doesn't matter what's running. As far as programs,
> when it's in that mode, whatever is running, that's what's hogging the
> power. I can turn off everything but 2 programs, for example, Word and
> another small program using 3,808, no internet connection or web pages
> open. If I close down Word, the small program will suddenly be using
> 90,000K. If I close down everything, it can still spike at 100%, this
> time with miscellaneous things like msoffice, my anti-virus program,
> svchost, etc. using up all the power.

> In the posts, the most recent culprit is identified as the automatic
> updates but I haven't had these enabled since I purchased the machine.
> And the process goes on and on since I've been semi-obsessed with the
> problem for a long time. I've tried what I could, read almost every
> post but nothing has ridded my pc of the problem.

> I had one period of about 4 months where the problem completely
> disappeared, where I though my old adage, "wait and hope long enough
> and Microsoft may get around to fixing it themselves" (an adage
> adopted because I've never known anyone able to influence them as to
> what they fix, or even to influence what they identify as needing
> fixing). But it must have been a fluke because it came back and I went
> right back to the users groups, thinking that surely someone had
> identified the real problem in the 4 months I was missing.

> Anyway, my point in all this is to say, based on my experience and
> completely non-technical background is that I think this is an XP bug,
> and that it is not a program or an add-on or spyware or anything else
> that is causing the problem. It's just too generalized for that and
> happens under too many circumstances. And I'm sorry that we've all had
> to waste so much time searching for fixes to a problem serious enough
> to disable our machines, a problem I feel Microsoft should've
> addressed a long time ago.

> In the meantime, I'll go back to the only long-term solution that
> works for me. Walk away from it and come back in a few hours - if I'm
> lucky, that will work and I can get a few hours out of it before it
> starts again. Try my fix.

Have you done a clean install to see if that fixes it? If so then image the
system to an external hard drive using something like Acronis True Image
Home version 10. Then start to build the system, adding programs and
testing. Make images along the way but save some of the images so you have
something to go back to.

My problem with that is that the 100% CPU power problem is so erratic,
how do I know when it's gone? I went 4 months without it once. Thanks!

Understood. On again, off again problems are hard to diagnose. Then again if there is something buggered on your system, that may be the way to eliminate it, and with regular imaging while things are running well you might be able to intercept it when a particular change triggers it, and allow you to go back a step to when it was working.

There was a starting point for it. Since you have been living with this for so long, trying to figure out what it is might not be possible, as might also be the case with figuring out a cure. It's so much easier to find the cause / eliminate the problem if it's attacked immediately after initial onset.

Only you can decide if you're at the point where you want to go this route. PA Bear gave you a variety of things to try based on recent developments. Good luck.

--
Rock [MS-MVP User/Shell]

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