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CPU Maxing out even when nothing showing in processes

AyresRock
Visitor

CPU Maxing out even when nothing showing in processes

Hello,
I have a VGN-FS115Z laptop which is my company laptop. when i was first given it 11 months ago, i was told it was very slow and didn't work. I formatted it and installed everything and it worked a dream.

over the past 4 months though, i have had to format it 3 times and about ready to do it again.

The laptop works fine but when this fault occurs, the loading up at XP screen takes an extra 5 minutes.

by looking at the processes, all that are running can be showing 0% in and the system idle process at 99% yet below will say around 50% to 80% in use (magic memory??). It will settle down after about 10 minutes and the laptop can be used without putting too much stress on it, not as well though as when fully working.

It does lock up again as above when doing things like extracting files from winRar or copying files over the network.

The times the problems occur, i have been doing different things (the first was after i installed microsoft office onto a VM, the second when the laptop started up and i had an XP disk in and it was about to load into the XP setup from boot. third time i am not too sure.

Any help on this would be much appriceated.

Cheers.

2 REPLIES 2
waterside
Visitor

Did you have the 'show processes from all users' option checked? Use the View | Select Columns option to show VM Size, Handles and Threads to see if any process is sucking up all the machine's resources. Perhaps you have some special networking or other system component that isn't behaving itself? Dodgy antivirus program? Try removing it and seeing if you still have trouble. Also, try scanning the system for adware/spyware/rootkits.

AyresRock
Visitor

Thanks for replying Waterside

i found the problem and have now cured it it seems.


i followed another thread on sound issues causing 60% cpu usage, it led me to this site DMA reverts to PIO

reading this, i started to have a look. it turned out that my primary IDE was set to PIO only hence the slowness. I service packed my laptop to SP2 again and then tried the .vbs script from the aforementioned website. Rebooted and my laptop Primary IDE is not on ultra DMA and not PIO.