CPU spike XP pro

[Wowbagger]

Dell P-IV with 1Gb RAM and XP Pro in a domained environment.

Within the past 24 hours my system has been experiencing frequent CPU spikes
that render the system unusable, but not completely locked up (waiting
several minutes before responding to CTRL-ALT-DEL, very jerky mouse
movement, beeping on keyboard buffer full, etc). A power cycle is the only
way to recover. The most recent change to the system was an automatically
downloaded Norton virus update a couple of days ago, and a manual norton
liveupdate cycle to see if that would fix the problem (it didn't).

Anti-virus and spyware scans (hijack this! and microsoft) both indicate
nothing out of the ordinary.

When the CPU spikes (google desktop system monitor tells me when CPU hits
100%) I can't CTRL-ALT-DEL to pull up the process list to see what is
stealing the CPU. It once happened while I had the proc list up and Outlook
2003 was currently hogging the resources, but I need to verify if this is
truly the culprit.

Is there a way to generate a system alert that is saved to a logfile every
30 seconds that notes any processes using >90% of system resources? That
would make it a piece of cake to reboot and see what the system was doing at
the time of lockup.

Thanks

 

[Heirloom]

Process Explorer, free, from www.sysinternals.com , is a great tool.
Amongst it's many features is the ability to 'graph' about 5 minutes worth
of cpu activity. The graph in the upper right of the GUI will indicate
what is utilizing the cpu by simply placing your mouse pointer over the
spike. BTW, the app only uses about 3-5% of the cpu while running and will
display a realtime cpu usage by every active process (even some that Windows
doesn't show you in End Task) in %.
Heirloom, old and like it