i need an expert. i have an excellent computer background but this has me stumped. I have a home built PC i have been running for several months with out any problems the last few days soemthing is causeing the disk drive and 1 cd drive to cycle using up my processor. this is windows XP and amd chip at 1.4 mhz the newest ASUS mother board 8x AGP graphics card cable modem and so on.... The task manager shows cpu usage up and down from abot 45% to 80% and system idle process at about 90. This problem usually does not accure till after the computer has been running awhile. There doesnt seem to be anything i can detect doin this. My virus defs are up to date and been scanned all drive have been checked for errors and defraged. this is getting annoying and i have had it happen before on another machine. it was correct by a fresh intall of the operating system which i am trying to avoid.. <br>Dan

 

On my homebuilt running Windows 2000, there was a process using 100% of the processor for about 3 minutes of every 10 minutes.<br>This would lock up the computer till it was done with whatever it was doing.<br><br>I did a Ctrl-Alt-Del, ran the task manager, and sorted it by processor usage, then just sat there and watched for what was doing it.<br><br>After I found what program it was, and where it resided, I went into the Administrative tools and found out I could &quot;uncheck&quot; it and prevent it from starting up.<br><br>I printed out what was running, from one of the pages in the Admin tools and took it to work.<br>Compared this list to what was running on 2 different WIN2K computers at work and found out I didn't need to have it running.<br>After &quot;unchecking&quot; it so it didn't run my computer didn't lock up every 7 minutes any more.<br><br>I did mess up and uncheck a couple of things that weren't needed at work, and were needed for DNS lookup here at home, after my internet stopped working, I then re-enabled those two things.<br><br>But, for the life of me, I can't remember what the program was.<br>I'd suggest doing the above, if even possible in XP, and seeing what program is causing it.<br><br>Of course, backup your computer, especially the registry files before doing this, so you have something to go back to if you totally mess stuff up.<br><br>Good Luck,<br><br>phox<br>

 

Sounds kind of like Find Fast is doing it. I'm not sure if XP has Find Fast, but you should be able to disable it via control panel or admin tools.<br><br>

 

DF: Maybe it would be good if you looked into your CPU fan. Had this problem some times with the ASUS boards. The CPU will decrease speed if too hot and the board may be configured not to sound the alarm.<br>You can check this by shutting down the machine and going into the BIOS immediately- there should be a point called PC Health or the like where you can check for temperatures, and voltages. (Sometimes a faulty power supply will look like this)<br><br>The indexing service in WinXP or OfficeXP can cause a similar behaviour. If you have lots of RAM you may not see the HDD led come on while it does reindex. <br><br>You can try to find the task that is eating up the CPU via the task manager and post the task name here.<br><br>Just my 2c<br><br>AlpineRAM

 

DF5152,<br>Is your machine running Norton AV? My work machine (running windows 2000) had a similar issuer. Norton's rtvscan.exe process was running 100% of the time on my cpu. Tech support tried to fix it several times but ended up doing a clean install to rectify the problem. There is some info about this issue on Symantec's/Norton's website.<br>Good luck.

 

thanks keep the ideas coming still unable to determine what was doing it but it seems to have stopped hasnt done it at all today.<br><br>Dan

 

Sounds like your PC is trying to hibernate(sp?). Might want to check the power settings.

 

[quote author=DF5152 link=board=10;threadid=14602;start=0#136906 date=1052625001]<br>i need an expert. i have an excellent computer background but this has me stumped. I have a home built PC....[/quote]<br><br>You went way above my head once you got that far....

 

Silly little XP bug on some systems, if you right on a desktop icon before you have left clicked on it, you can chew up CPU time.<br><br>Turn off animated cursors and you fix it.<br><br>BTW as far as I'm concerned, turn off all of the background stuff that makes the desktop look fancy and you will save CPU cycles.

 

PC's are very much like cars; they may hit on 5 of 8 cylinders on the way to the shop, but runs like a champ with the mechanic there.

I'll resist putting on XP as long as I can.

When I first read your post, I thought it may be heat related because you said that it runs fine for a while; and you haven't made any system changes. Software issues and bugs don't care about heat. You may want to take a peek at your BIOS settings. System usage shouldn't change from 100%; you should only the usage %'s move from a particular service and/or idle to make up the differences.

My old ASUS board started acting goofy once, and it turned out to be a bad AGP video card.

And like said above, keep an eye on Task Manager to see if you can see a culprit.

I've been running Seti for many years now, and I try and keep every non-essential service turned off to keep my seti to clock cycle ratio high.