J
jcp370
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.
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.