Samrc Posted May 27, 2005 Share Posted May 27, 2005 Ok... Trying to help my boss with her machine. It's a with AMD Athlon, 1.73Ghz, 512ram The one fan tends to be loud when you start the machine but then quiets down to normal. Not connected to the web via telephone or cable, at idle her machine is showing a cpu usage of 25-43% all the time. Surfing web, pulling in email, playing games is impossible with the slowdown of her system. My first thought was some piece of yuck has invaded so this is what I have done: In msconfig, unchecked everything in startup unchecked except for the nvidia driver NvCpl which comes back anyway. Looked for wacko entries, non found. Removed her old outdated non-supported Norton Antivirus and a couple other non-essential programs (backup battery cable connection, etc.) which did lower the CPU usage a tad. - Online Virus scan from Trend - nothing found - AdawareSE - only a few cookies found and cleared - Spybot S&D - nothing found - AVG antivirus - nothing found - CWshredder - nothing found - AVERT Stinger - nothing found - Hijackthis - log showed nothing unusual - posted it online for instant analysis and all was safe. Run most in Safe mode too with same result. Ran /sfc scannow with nothing found. SO... After all the effort, the machine is STILL running at high CPU usage 25-43%, before you open the first program. If connected to the web using a temporary dial up connection here at the office, with no programs or browser open, the CPU usage jumps to the range of 44-69%. I loaded a program filemon to see the files being acessed by the processes and it will take me a while to go through it. I googled for high cpu usage and found OLD posts that were mainly about spyware/scumware and things I had already tried. Any suggestions? I am stumped at this point. HELP PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!! -Samantha Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TCH-Bruce Posted May 27, 2005 Share Posted May 27, 2005 What OS? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Samrc Posted May 27, 2005 Author Share Posted May 27, 2005 WHOOPS. Thought I mentioned everything and forgot one of the most important! Windows Xp Home edition with SP2, all updates from MS loaded. -Samantha Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TCH-Bruce Posted May 27, 2005 Share Posted May 27, 2005 I'm finding SP2 being a bit of a pig. So much slower than SP1. I'm sure you have opened the task manager and looked at the list of programs running. That may give an indication of what's going on. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Samrc Posted May 27, 2005 Author Share Posted May 27, 2005 As I mentioned, all programs except windows, off in startup, no applications listed in taskmanager, 21 processes (windows related), no icons in tray at bottom, all scans for assorted yuck clean, but still running slow, performance tab showing CPU is reving up when machine is idle and only gets worse if you actually try to work in a program, play a game or go on the web to surf or get email. Since it does not appear to be a form of yuck (virus to spyware) I am PUZZLED. -Samantha Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cajunman4life Posted May 27, 2005 Share Posted May 27, 2005 (edited) First off, it's Windows. There, problem solved. Just kidding... When you open the task manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del), on the "Processes" tab there is a list of all running processes. I assume you know about this judging by the fact you know the CPU usage %. There is a column entitled "CPU" which gives the percentage of CPU usage for each running process. Find the one that's high, and let us know what the "Image Name" is. Then maybe we can work this out for ya. Edit: As for the fan being loud at start-up, that's normal. In modern computers, the bios controls the fan speed based off the CPU temerature. So when the machine first starts up, the fan is at max speed, until the bios takes a reading of the processor temp and adjusts the RPM of the fan accordingly. This is prevalent in servers (which I work with on a daily basis), as they have usually between 5 and 8 fans per machine. They sound like a tornado siren, even in an already loud data center. Edited May 27, 2005 by cajunman4life Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Samrc Posted May 27, 2005 Author Share Posted May 27, 2005 (edited) Well (Could be a deep subject)..... That's another wacko thing about this...all maintain at 0%. Only the system idle process shows 98-99% which is top notch! When I started this process, I came into it fairly confident that I could locate the source of the problem. I came to the msconfig, control panel programs, task list, performance and processes tab right away as often you can find something right away that obviously does not belong. I've dealt with lots of friends, neighbors and relatives infected machines and have gotten fairly proficient at diagnosis. But this machine refuses to give up secrets! Jan just came out to tell me that she forgot to mention that before bringing the machine to the office for me to work on, she had tried to start it twice and both times she had only a medium GRAY screen each time and the system would not fully boot up. She hard shut down and tried again. She's worried about the hard drive now. I am in the process of running a full scan disk and then will perform a defrag. Originally she said she had just done one. But today I pressed her again and the more she thought about it, she couldn't remember doing it in a while. Any suggestions welcome! First off, it's Windows. There, problem solved. Just kidding... Deep down you weren't kidding! I agree! And thanks for the reassurance on the fan. I know as machines get older, they also create more noise. She has two fans and has had to replace the power supply box (with fan) once so was concerned that might be necessary again. Told her I did not think so. -Samantha Edited May 27, 2005 by Samrc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Samrc Posted May 27, 2005 Author Share Posted May 27, 2005 (edited) OK......NOT GOOD! The computer is on its third scan disk and when it finishes it tries to boot windows and goes back into scan disk! During the first round it found a bad cluster with an mp3 file in it. The auto fix was turned on so the system would supposedly fix the problem. But now the system will not boot! Might be a bad driver, possibly the nvidia driver (was a problem a year ago) according to Jan. BUT...... Since I can not boot the system (even into safe mode) how to I get her back up and running? UPDATE: I hit f8 and chose last working windows configuration and machine is back up (still high CPU) but up and running exactly as it was before the scan disk was run. She tells me she did not backup the photos and other files despite constant preaching on my part to do so. So will tackle that then just use her restore disk to wipe it all was trying to avoid that, but now seems necessary. -Samantha Edited May 27, 2005 by Samrc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stevevan Posted May 27, 2005 Share Posted May 27, 2005 Have you got a bootable floppy? (Does the machine even HAVE a floppy?) Despite all the preaching, sometimes it takes something like this to drive a point home. (Experience speaking here.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madmanmcp Posted May 27, 2005 Share Posted May 27, 2005 When I first read this thread earlier this morning my initial reaction was whats wrong with 40% CPU usage, for some folks this is the low end and is not an issue. I was going to reply but got distracted and had to leave. Now returning I see you are having other difficulties and this maybe the route of your problem. A CPU running at 40% or even 60% is not a bad thing and should not cause a system "slowdown". Once you get over 80% there will be a need to be concerned but the system should still run fine. A bad spot or spots are a better explanation for a system slowdown. When one is reached the system tries over and over again to read the drive until it gets past the error and this will look like a system slowdown. The computer processes things in order and if it can't complete a request (read disk) it does not complete other task behind it. So first thing to concentrate on is the hard drive problem. It will ether need to be corrected or replaced. Once the hard drive is working correctly you can revisit the CPU/slowdown, but I have a feeling it will be corrected by the harddrive being fixed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cajunman4life Posted May 31, 2005 Share Posted May 31, 2005 Madmanmcp is right. I recently had to replace the hard drive in my gf's laptop (what a joyous experience... at least I can get my big fingers in a server). It was doing something similar... there was a bad "spot" that it continuously tried to read, and the system would "freeze" until Windows gave up. A new drive fixed everything. If the computer has an open IDE port (check the ribbon cable most have at least two) plug in a new drive, and use something like Norton Ghost to copy over everything from the old drive. This works especially well if you have a drive and Norton Ghost laying around (it hurts to spend a lot of money to fix a problem, only to find out you didn't fix the problem). Keep us updated, I love problems. And yes, deep down I wasn't really kidding about the Windows part... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cajunman4life Posted June 8, 2005 Share Posted June 8, 2005 Hey, what's the word on this problem? Haven't heard from you in a while... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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