CPU USAGE

[Guest]

HI
My machine has been running perfectly. Suddenly the other night it slowed
down progressively until it was almost impossible to use. Since then when I
start up it is fine but as I use the machine over the period of aprox. an
hour it starts to slow down. When I press ctrl alt del the cpu usage graph
jumps from anywhere from 10 to 30 up to 100 percent constantly whether I am
using a program or not. It will continue to do this until it seems it goes to
100 percent and sits there and I can not even use the mouse to scroll around.
I have run my virus check and also Adaware etc. to no avail. Can anyone
explain this problem to me and how I may fix it. THANKS FOR ANY HELP

 

[Dave Patrick]

multi-posted

--

Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
http://www.microsoft.com/protect

| HI
| My machine has been running perfectly. Suddenly the other night it slowed
| down progressively until it was almost impossible to use. Since then when
I
| start up it is fine but as I use the machine over the period of aprox. an
| hour it starts to slow down. When I press ctrl alt del the cpu usage graph
| jumps from anywhere from 10 to 30 up to 100 percent constantly whether I
am
| using a program or not. It will continue to do this until it seems it goes
to
| 100 percent and sits there and I can not even use the mouse to scroll
around.
| I have run my virus check and also Adaware etc. to no avail. Can anyone
| explain this problem to me and how I may fix it. THANKS FOR ANY HELP
| --
| Terry

 

[Guest]

I have the same issue. After restarting, my machine (XP, SP2 running on
Compaq 86Z) runs fine for about one hour, then degrades seriously, as
"tezterry" states. I have defragmented the drive, removed all temp storage
(40G free), run Microsoft scan, AdAware can, Spybot Scan and none of them
report problems. Abotu 6 months ago, I purchased and loaded Norton Internet
Security and Virus Scan. This ran fine for about 4 months and then my PC
performance got real bad. After watching the process CPU time in the Task
Manager, it seemed that symmantec process were always hogging resources, so I
removed Norton completely. This helped a lot...fro abotu 3 weeks, now the
performance is once again bad. Just this morning, for example, after letting
a Microsoft download continue through the night for the latest Office 2003
updates (since I could not afford to wait hours for it), at 6:14 in the
morning, the time display in the lower right corner showed 2:14 !!!
Another example: just to display the system information, to record it above
required 35 seconds after the last mouse-click, before the information was
displayed.

Someone please help!

 

[Gerry Cornell]

After any significant system change you should defragment your hard drive.


Try Start, All Programmes, Accessories, System Tools, Disk CleanUp to
Empty your Recycle Bin and Remove Temporary Internet Files. Delete all
but the most recent Restore Point ( Start, Programs, Accessories, System
Tools, Disk Cleanup, More options). Run Disk Defragmenter by selecting
Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Defragmenter.


How much RAM memory? Try Ctrl+Alt+Delete to bring Task Manager and
select the Performance Tab. What is the Total, the Commit Charge and the
Peak?


How large is your hard drive? Is it partitioned? How much free space on
each drive / partition. How is the drive formatted -FAT32 or NTFS. To
get this information whilst in Windows Explorer place the cursor on each
drive in turn, right click and select Properties.


What is your CPU speed?


~~~~~~


Hope this helps.


Gerry
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
FCA


Stourport, Worcs, England
Enquire, plan and execute.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Please tell the newsgroup how any
suggested solution worked for you.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[Guest]

Thanks Gerry. That was helpful.

I had already gone through the defragment, cleanup and remove temp files...
steps.
These are still good for the posting for others to follow first as well.

CPU speed should not be the problem as it runs at 1665 MHz.

I had also already examined memory usage. Physical memory is 256M, but only
45M are available. I tried to find out why, from Microsoft support pages,
but was not able to. Still the "windows task manager" shows more than 68M
available (strange?) but occasionally, the available amount dips down to 17M.
This seems a likely suspect for my performance problems.

At the same time System Cache continues to grow at the rate of 2-4K per
second. Not sure how long this should be monitored before declaring it a
memory leak, but on a relatively idle system, this certainly seems like a
leak.

After being so frsustrated by this, I have rebuilt my system and it is much
improved.
In the course of restoring it, I found several helpful microsoft support
pages. Not sure why these were so hard to find earlier, but they were quite
helpful. They suggest that more memory (of course) and disk partitioning are
most helpful, as you have also implied.

In my case, my drive is only 20% utilized and is formatted at NTFS. Can you
please elaborate on what the performance differences would be for FAT32
versus NTFS?

Thanks for your help.

here are the support pages that I found most helpful:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308417

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/255867

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313348/en-us

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q185832

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q259161

Enjoy!