Quite frequently, the machine slows way down. (I rarely
use much more than 5% of the processor as I don't
game,etc.) When I open the windows task managers
performance tab, it shows that the processor is running at
100%. It usually happens when I am not running anything
more than Internet Explorer. After a minute or two, the
usage goes back to 3 to 5% and the computer speeds back
up. The system is a Compaq Presario6000 with an AMD Athlon
processor.
Any ideas are appreciated,
Matt
Hi Matt,
Look at the process list in the Task Manager and see which application
is using all the cycles. You may have to enable CPU usage display
from the View menu. You may have some software running in the
background that you are unaware of.
Here are some other possibilities.
1)
XP shipped with a bug in one of the system services (I forget which)
that caused random slowdowns. The bug was fixed in SP1. Make sure
you have SP1 and, at least, all the critical updates installed.
2)
If you have DirectCD installed you need to turn off the IMAPI CD
Burning service. The IMAPI service is itself a stripped down version
of DirectCD, but if you have it enabled and the full commercial
version is also installed, they interfere with each other and cause
strange things to happen.
3)
I have seen DVD players cause CPU spikes in Explorer for no apparent
reason even with no disc in the drive.
4)
If the culprit really is Internet Explorer, it could be as simple as
animations playing or a Java applet or ActiveX control running on the
web page being displayed. A lot of web pages have self refreshing
ads and other assorted crap which causes the browser to continually
fetch new data even though you aren't doing anything. Try opening a
different page and see if it still happens.
5)
If you have a slow or flakey ISP connection there is another
possibility which makes #4 even worse.
Both IE and Netscape cause CPU spikes when a web page download stalls.
Netscape tells when this happens on its status line, but IE doesn't
bother ... it just sits there with a stuck progress bar. The CPU
usage typically returns to normal when the download finally resumes
and the page is drawn successfully ... but not always: on occasion the
browser just locks up and has to be killed.
I first noticed the behavior in Netscape 4.0 and IE 3.0 and I have
seen it in every version of both browsers since. It is present in
both the older Netscape Communicator and the new Mozilla versions, and
in all versions of Internet Explorer. The lockups have become very
infrequent in the latest versions, but still happen occasionally.
Being a software engineer who was writing a TCP based application at
the time, I was initially worried that there was some horrible bug in
the Windows networking code, but I and some other developers from my
company carefully tested the Windows TCP implementation and found no
obvious problems caused by stalled data transfers. Everything behaved
as advertised and we all stopped worrying about it.
My guess (never confirmed) is that when the input data stream is
interrupted, the threaded display code in the browsers doesn't stop
and wait for more data, but instead just spins in a tight loop wasting
CPU cycles.
That's all I have ... hope something here helps.
George
