a little PC help Please

Art Scott

Sunday computer running great......Monday approx 18 hours later - - - cpu monitor showing 100% usage :scratch ....Task Manager showing same :scratch ......can't open anything and can't force an anti-virus update for Avast or AVG :splat .....

Never leave anythng runing in background except for the A.V. software.

Anyone have a clue as to what can cause this and how to fix prob?

THANX!

Richard

Art,

Some process is off in the weeds. I have had this happen from time to time with programs that are normally very well behaved, including Firefox and Photoshop CS2. Not often, fortunately.

Open the task manager and click on the processes tab. Then click on the CPU heading to sort the list in order of current cpu consumption. The rogue will be at the top. You can then select the process and hit the end process button. In some cases, you will lose data this way, but you really don't have any choice... the process is likely in an infinite loop and is never going to complete. Your only other alternative is powering down the machine, but this is much more likely to lead to problems.

HTH.

wxwax

Richard

rsinmadrid wrote:

Art,

Some process is off in the weeds. I have had this happen from time to time with programs that are normally very well behaved, including Firefox and Photoshop CS2. Not often, fortunately.

Open the task manager and click on the processes tab. Then click on the CPU heading to sort the list in order of current cpu consumption. The rogue will be at the top. You can then select the process and hit the end process button. In some cases, you will lose data this way, but you really don't have any choice... the process is likely in an infinite loop and is never going to complete. Your only other alternative is powering down the machine, but this is much more likely to lead to problems.

HTH.

One other thing I should have mentioned. You may not recognize the name of the process. Windows has dozens of processes running all the time even when no application program is running. Killing some of these processes can make your system unstable, or even cause a system crash. If you don't crash, it is wise to restart your system after killing the process to restore the system to health.

If you weren't running any new, untested software the most likely cause of the problem was some transient hardware problem. Power fluctuation, random read error, some zero that should have been a one. There is nothing to be concerned about here unless you start seeing this happen frequently.

DavidTO

Sid, FYI, Activity Monitor in OSX has the same ability, for when you're on your MacBook. Occasionally processes get hung, hogging resources and it's a good way to axe them. Or you can just restart.

wxwax

DavidTO wrote:

Sid, FYI, Activity Monitor in OSX has the same ability, for when you're on your MacBook. Occasionally processes get hung, hogging resources and it's a good way to axe them. Or you can just restart.

<img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/thumb.gif&quot; border="0" alt="" > Thanks, David. I'm the king of restarts. My Macbook has scared me a couple of times by being unwilling to turn on. Closing the lid worked one time, unplugging it worked another. No idea what it was thinking. Time to run some maintenance, I reckon.

<end hijack>

Art Scott

Thanks everyone...I have already restarted the machine 3 times prior to first post... ...so tomorrow AM will do as instructed and will post results.....

Thanks again to all and especially Richard.

LuckyBob

rsinmadrid wrote:

Killing some of these processes can make your system unstable, or even cause a system crash. If you don't crash, it is wise to restart your system after killing the process to restore the system to health.

A bit of an extended explanation on this bit: the processes which Windows requires to run are protected so you can't end them via Task Manager. The only "essential" process other than the protected ones is explorer.exe (which is the Windows shell - Start menu, desktop, etc). Software or hardware that's been installed on a machine may/will install more processes which run in the background and may be required for that particular piece of software or hardware, but usually killing them won't destabalize a system unless the process program is written badly, and sadly a percentage of them are badly written.

Generally though, it's safe to kill most processes without seriously destabilizing a system (although using the system before rebooting may bring up wierd quirks regarding the killed process); you can find what the process does (and thus if you need to worry about killing it) via a Google search for the process name. If it happens to be a process which is fairly essential to keep running (such as antivirus), most non-critical processes let you set CPU priority to lower than normal, which means other programs will be first in line for CPU time. A neat trick if you're running some insanely long Photoshop action or other CPU-hog operation is to fire up Task Manager and lower the priority of the offending application so you can surf the net/watch video/whatever at full speed while the other process finishes in the background.

Art Scott

LuckyBob wrote:

you can find what the process does (and thus if you need to worry about killing it) via a Google search for the process name. .

LuckyBob...
My situation is this....turn on PC..all loads up fine, after all is loaded the cpu usage meter shows 100% and I cannot get to internet to google the only thing I can seem to get to come up is task mgr......still not at home 'puter yet will try doing the delete processes as Richard suggested and will report back as to effectiveness.....

thanx

Richard

Art Scott wrote:

LuckyBob...
My situation is this....turn on PC..all loads up fine, after all is loaded the cpu usage meter shows 100% and I cannot get to internet to google the only thing I can seem to get to come up is task mgr......still not at home 'puter yet will try doing the delete processes as Richard suggested and will report back as to effectiveness.....

thanx

Hmm...that doesn't sound good. The situation I described shouldn't happen right after booting. Be sure to note the name of the process that is out of control, so you can later see what turns up on Google. You could have some sort of malware infection or a hardware issue. If you have a hardware diagnostics disk, you should try booting from it then running the diags.

cmason

Art I have had a similar issue lately, and have found that yahoo messenger is at fault, somehow consuming all CPU. Once I kill Yahoo messenger, everything is fine.

One other idea: I also get this kind of behavior when I have my iPod connected on start up. My iPod is connected via Firewire, and I think Windows gets very confused when is sees the iPod attached at start up, so I have learned to always disconnect (guess I need a dock).

Art Scott

Thanks everyone again....finally got the anti-viruses updated and started a scan late last night....now off to see what is the verdict on that.....had to print off all the suggestions from a different computer to start in looking at processes....so I hope to be back up and running this evening.

Thanks again

Art Scott

All righty.... I am now on my home computer and the cpu usage meter shows less than 20% most of the time.....however when I went to another site it shot up to 100% and did it also when I came back here....Hmmmm seems to be an internet thing right now...but have printed off al the suggestions in case I have the prob again at a later date....this box is old..Pent 3 512mb Ram....so that is one reason I have a scratch disk...however I have always had a small drive allocated for a scratch disk......

THAKS TO ALL FOR THE SUGGESTION...TRULY APPRECIATED.

Art Scott

Damn I.E....
I have come to the conclusion that my prob has to do with IE...cause when I go into FF and serf da net....my cpu usage stays below 15% most around 3 to 8%.......damn MS products.......

But on FF I can play and play and not lock up.....

LuckyBob

Spikes in CPU usage are totally normal - the spikes caused by IE when loading a page are IE formatting and rendering the page. Firefox and Opera also spike, but as their rendering engines are faster than IE, on simple pages Task Manager's CPU meter may not register it. Loading a complex page (littered with Flash animations or complex layouts) will show this better. If IE is full-on locking up, it might be one of the many plugins latching onto IE - Acrobat has a major history of causing problems with IE, for example.

I gather that the machine is running better now; the issue you were having before may have been IE, although as it doesn't run by default when Windows loads, it's unlikely. More likely, if it was happening on startup, it was either a frozen system process or driver, or possibly a non-essential application. The other possible cause of a badly performing system that doesn't show up with Task Manager is an overactive disk subsystem (some viri or Antivirus programs tend to stress the disk but not the CPU). Windows Performance Monitor works well for checking this (among basically all other facets of how the system's running); details at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/Windows2000Pro/reskit/part6/proch27.mspx?mfr=true.

As far as startup, BootVis is a great utility for checking what happens (published by Microsoft - only works with Windows XP) - http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=664. I'd install this and watch for issues. If the performance issues happen on startup run Bootvis and see what loads when the CPU/disk usage spikes and stays spiked. If you notice anything in particular, feel free to post it here so we can diagnose it. Isn't free tech support great?

Art Scott

LuckyBob wrote:

Isn't free tech support great?

yeah it is and that is why I have been laying on the THANXXXXXX bowbowbowbowbowbowbowbowbowclap