CPU keeps going to 100%--any suggestions to remedy?

My best guess is that it is a software issue. Here's what you can do to find out:

1. Sometimes an antivirus (like Symantec) clogs a lot of memory and CPU time. close your anti-virus application and see if there is any improvement in performance.

2. If you are using some P2P software, close them too. some of these s/w like emule clog a lot of memory.

3. Check your Processes in Task Manager. Use Ctrl+Alt+Del and select the Task Manager tab. Here you'll find all the foreground and background processes running on your machine. Click Mem Usage column title and all the processes will be sorted in the ascending order. Now check which processes are occupying most of your memory and have high CPU number. Just shut down that service temporarily and see if your PC performance has increased. If it works, and the process if of your trusted software, may be you'd need to find out more on that software.

4. Task Manager sometimes does not display all the processes. Some virus/spyware skip Task Manager. Download a small tool HiJack from Trend Micro, the famous anti-virus compnay. Here is the link:
http://www.trendsecure.com/portal/en-US/_download/HiJackThis.exe

Execute and scan your pc with this tool, and you'll get a list of all processes running on your machine. check if there nay unknown process running. It could be a virus or spyware. You can then search more on internet about that.

5. Try running your PC in safe mode and check if there is nay gain in PC performance.

If nothing works, may be you need to reinstall Os or check your hardware.

Tell me when this happens, if it is at boot up, or after the windows starts it can be the windows checking for updates, along with the virus and other updates that happen then. This often utilizes the cpu to 100%. There is supposed to be a check box that you can mark or undo to stop this but then you have to manually do the updates.
Questions for this would be does it do this after tuesday each week or the last several weeks. Thats MS.

lack of key details keeps us all guessing
so first open up your task manager and see which processes are using all your resources and then you can type the names that you come up with into google and you will see what others have done before you with the same systoms

good luck and take care

This type of mystery can be solved by taking a closer look at the processes that run on your machine. More specifically, which process is driving up the CPU utilization when you experience the problem.

Don't waste your time with task manager, instead get the ProcessExplorer by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell (the were too good to be left alone so Microsoft brought them onboard):
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

Also checkout their other great system tools from the "Sysinternals" website:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx

So what to do if the process that's causing the CPU to throttle up turns out to be the generic "svchost.exe", simply use the windows command "tasklist /svc" (see below) to show which named services are running under all pid-identified instances of svchost.exe(there will be multiple instances):
First start the command window start>run>cmd (then run the following command to see the results)
tasklist /svc

You would then make a comparison by PID number from the output of the command above with the PID that shows for the process that is using 100% of your CPU in ProcessExplorer.

If you're situation is the same as mine was, you'll find out the culprit is "Automatic Updates" that is driving up the CPU. Basically this problem can happen if you have your machine set to "automatically download" windows updates. The symptom will be a svchost.exe process that drives your CPU to 100% and if you were to identify the PID for the svchost that is doing this (if you're not using ProcessExplorer you can use taskmgr - view>select columns>checkoff PID) and then run the tasklist /svc command as shown above, it would show that "Automatic Updates" is contained in the svchost.exe that is causing the problem.

You can also try changing the setting for your Automatic Updates to "notify for download and then notify for install" via Control Panel > Automatic Updates. If you change this setting and the problem goes away then checkout the articles at the link below for the fix or just leave "automatic download" feature of Automatic Updates off and control it yourself by being "notified to download and then notified to install" windows updates:
http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=607979


Finally, for the ultimate fix to your problem, I suggest you take a look at the Linux operating system. I'm typing this from Ubuntu Linux, and we use Edubuntu, PCLOS, and Fedora Linux as the primary OS in our home and we are very happy with the freedom and power that we receive while using Linux. We have one computer that can dual-boot Windows or Linux but everyone likes to use the Linux instead. Checkout the Linux LiveCD list at: http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php
and the top ten Linux Distros and reviews at distrowatch.com:
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major


Good Luck!
Shannon VanWagner
http://healthysystem.blogspot.com
http://digg.com/users/bicep

I was suffering the same problem with the CPU going to 100%. I've uninstall a lot of programs, trying to solve the problem freeing memory ram, but the freezing still persist, until yesterday. With Task Manager I took notice of a process call sp_rsser.exe, that was running in the background and using a lot of resources. That process is part of the real time protection of Spyware Terminator. After reading a lot of complaints in the forums about ST, with no cabal support and solutions, I removed that program from my computer, and guest what? My computer is running without delays,using at the same time Firefox , writing this letter,listen to music with Media Monkey, a p2p program working,and the CPU reading 32% .

I hope this would help to someone, and please check the links below

http://forum.spywareterminator.com/Default.aspx?g=posts&m=20042
http://forum.spywareterminator.com/Default.aspx?g=posts&t=3436

to get an idea of the problems with this anti-spyware.

Greetings

Could be using a pentium 1 or a pentium 2 or a pentium 3 or a pentium 4 or pentium D computer that has 128 mb ram.

I realize that I am coming in late in the process, but I have a similar problem. I have used Task Manager and have identified that Internet Explorer 7 is the culprit that changes my cpu usage from about 6-7% normal to 100% as soon as I invoke it. I have tried to uninstall IE7 and re-install it but with the same consequences of 100% usage and a frozen machine.
I have temporarily switched to using Firefox as my browser and it does NOT result in any excessive CPU usage.
Has anyone experienced this and are there any suggested solutions?

I had this exact same problem after Windows OneCare upgraded itself (whidh was odd, because it had a hard time achieving that, and it didnt' tell me I was getting this upgrade).

I turned on my computer one morning and my security center was in red and said that I didn't have antivirus software on my computer. So I opened OneCare and it gave me the message that I should reboot or call tech support. I rebooted to the same messaage. I rebooted again, then recieved an error message from OneCare saying that it had an upgrage that couldn't download, and that I'd have to reboot AGAIN. So this went on until I was finally able to get the "upgrade". THAT's when my CPU usage shot thru the roof and would maintain 100% usage (which worried me, plus it slowed everything WAAAAAY down.

I had to call Microsoft tech support and for once they were stymied, and have to have an engineer call me back over it. So, the long/short of it is, the "upgrade" had to be uninstalled and treated very differently than it had been set to do. Some minor configuring had to be done, and one more piece to the puzzle (I'm so sorry, I forget now) I've written my IT buddy asking him what that final step was, becaue Microsoft was NOT able to help me resolve the issue that they had created.

I love Microsoft products and beta test much of their goodies, but I have recently quit using OneCare as an antivirus program and gone to McAfee (which used to be crap, but now it's pretty dang good!)

Anyway, I hope this helps someone, somewhere
Have a good weekend

Most likely you do a lot of surfing on the internet, and also receive a lot of email! Regular PC maintenance is what is required. You most likely have more than one trogan and a lot of spyware on your PC. Spyware is continually trying to send your personal information out over the internet taking up your CPU resources. Ligitiment websites are also trying to get your information. Some foreign vendors download false virus alerts than point you to their website to buy their software product to resolve the problem.
There is no one solution to resolve the 100 % CPU usage problem. The easy soluton would be to format the internal harddrive blowing away everthing that is contaminated and re-install everything. The second solution may involve using more than one tool. A virus could also be in ram memory. installed there buy a command from the registry. I use Symantec Anti virus and I keep the virus library updated. I also use Spy Sweeper, Ad Aware SE personal, SpyBOT, Windows defender, and Zone Alarm firewall. The one tool that I have not used is a registry cleaner. Command lines there can re-start the same problem over and over again. All of these tools catch something that the others missed. I scan my harddrive with all the tools on a regular basis. Symantec also checks the email. I hope this helps. If you are not familiar with these tools you have a little bit of a learning curve but it is worth it.

Hello, I had this problem and agree with others that it's a drastic measure to do a complete format for what is normally an incompatibility between two or more programs.

It does help to see what processes are hogging the spotlight but this can also steer you in the WRONG direction. In my case when I killed the offending process the problem would jump to another process like Firefox and others which I knew wasn't causing the problem.

The offenders kept coming up as, in this order:

PC-cillin (didn't want to cancel that process for obvious reasons)

A network driver for the HP 1012 Laser printer I have installed.

Multiple instances of aolsoftware.exe (I had AIM installed and AOL 9)

Whenever I killed those processes the problem would jump to Firefox and freeze it.

I was running Trend Micro's PC-cillin 2007 and Spybot Search & Destroy. Two programs that always worked well for me but when Trend Micro updated their scan engine things started to go awry. They are aware of the problem and their suggested fixes didn't work for some reason. So with regret I un-installed Spybot S&D. It was probably overkill to have both but I found in the past they were very effective together.

End of story? No! After careful observation I found now that whenever I printed something soon after the CPU would go to 100% utilization.

I updated the driver from HP's site.. Same problem. So I un-installed the complete HP printer driver/manager program and let windows find a simple driver for it. No more problems from the printer driver. CPU use down to below 12% with lots of stuff running.

I then found a program by Mike Lin called Startup Control Panel 2.8 and used it to block AOL processes as well as others that don't need to be running from loading at boot-up.

This worked for me. I had suffered with this problem for a year before I realized what was going on. It was getting so bad I didn't want to use the PC from the whine of all of the fans going full blast. This problem probably will shorten the life of your PC in the long run by making it run hot and also you will be using more electricity. Costing you money in utility bills. An insidious problem.

See if you have any of these running on your PC. Sadly It could be that another groups of programs is causing your problem. With so many programs running in combination with so many possible interactions it is hard for software vendors to nail down problems like this.

Good luck!

There have been some excellent suggestions. I'm not sure if anyone has already suggested the following concerning Internet Explorer. It is very simple to do, but may remedy many cpu prossessing and memory hogging problems.

In Internet Explorer, select Tools then Internet Options.

While at the General Tab click the Settings button... it should be near the middle of the window on the right hand side.

At the top of the Settings window, under "Check for newer versions of the page:" select the button for either "Every visit to the page" or "Never".

It has always surprised me how often this is the culprit when someone tells me how slow their computer is running or how slow the internet is when they are on either cable or DSL. And it is soooo easy to fix.

If using Netscape, this option is under Edit/Preferences/Advanced/Cashe

Firefox doesn't appear to have this as an option.

Hope this helps someone, anyway.

iogt007 touched on this in Post 188

I have 3 computers on a network and this was driving me nuts. In the task manager I would try to end process for adobeupdater.exe but it would not respond. I would have to reboot each time. I use spybot s&d tools to control start-up programs. It didn't help in this case because it was the opening of a pdf file that triggered the process. Adobe supposedly issued a fix for this months ago which I downloaded. The problem persisted. My solution was to go to (if memory serves) C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\ and delete-Updater 5 folder-I shredded it with bleach cause I was pissed-it felt good-ah life's small pleasures! I can still update AdobeReader manually, but then (after a reboot if necessary-won't delete if process running) I go directly to updater folder and delete it. I can open pdf files without dealing with the 100% cpu every time.

PS I have 1GB Ram 200GB memory and an AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3800+ 1.8 GHz There's no excuse for program updaters to do this.

What has helped me in the past is press ctrl-alt-del and check running proccesses. If you are unsure what they are ........ write them down and type them into the Google search bar or your favorite search engine. There is a wealth of information out there on each one of these running processes. My worst offender recently was Nero Scout which was hogging about 50% of the CPU Usage because I have a lot of files. I turned off Nero Scout which fixed the problem. In this post there were also references to problems with Windows Live OneCare. Several weeks ago Live OneCare informed me that it could not update itself. Windows update was not working either. After searching the archives for two days for a fix for this problem,(Microsoft was no help), I gave up, Backed up files, wiped the hard drive slick and re-installed windows, updates & drivers. I'm still using Live OneCare basically because I just renewed my subscription. It's working ok now with the exception it slows down everything the same as all the rest of the anti-virus programs, but I've got a killer fast Alienware Computer so it doesn't bother me.

1. Check your memory at least 1 gb is needed to run for windows xp. 2. Check power supply depending on processer speed and vidoecard drives at least 450 watts is enough.3. check your hard drives Arethey close to capacity? 4. Back-up you drive information and re-install Windows Xp.

Some bad written files can freeze the the system.
When you hit the mouse on the file, XP search for informations missing in the file.
Theses informations are not necessary for playing the file.
But readind a full file can be very long.
You can clean the register of this option.

Now, I don't know if your a gamer or not. Regardless, does your computer have a graphics card?
Because if not, your CPU would be running all of that which should be ran by one.
In example, jut running the internet. Your cpu is taking on the job of loading everything up. And if you don't have a graphics card, it's taking on the job of rendering all the graphics that appear on your screen.
By adding even a cheapy, 60-80 dollar graphics card, would help you tremendously, especially since XP doesn't demand nearly as much as Vista. The card would take off so much load that the CPU formerly had to take card of, leaving it to do other things--- faster.

And a bit more RAM never hurts! But the graphics card would be HUGE.
Hope this helps!

I also experienced a similar problem last week. I first tried to clean up for any spyware or viruses but nothing was there in the system. I took back up all the data. I knew pretty well that my system was working fine up to the previous week . i took the folowing steps
1) open my computer right click local disk C: go to propertiesthen go to tools .Then select wrror checking. select both the options there.
2) next time when you try to login it will check the C drive and fix for any errors.
3) It took about 4 hrs to complete this and reboot.
4) then try to use system recovery and restore the system settings to the previous date which you feel it is fine. Please note this option will remove all the changes done in the system after the slected date but documents and files will remain as per the latest change. any how take back up before doing anything.

After this my system settings were successfully restored to the previous date which i selected and my system is working fine now

S.Ganesh

This happened to one of my systems after a relative installed a seemingly innocuous program. All of a sudden a perfectly good system turned into a snail. It wasn't even in the startup programs list. It took me a while realize that everything started after that program was installed, and even more time before I convinced myself that - even though it didn't seem at all probable - it was possible that program was the culprit. Sure enough, I uninstalled the program and my CPU was happy again. I still have no idea why that one little program caused the trouble, but I couldn't argue with the facts.

When something develops a problem, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, Word, etc., Windows will close it. Since I installed SP2, DumpRep.exe (shown in the list of processes under Task Manager), hogs the processor and eventually hangs up. I click on it, end the task, and the processor immediately drops back to a few percent of usage. I've reinstalled the system twice and it doesn't help a bit.

My computer Windows XP Home SP2 computer for 5 years has been getting slower and slower. I know my computer is not infected with spyware or viruses as I run a pretty tight ship when it comes to security. So what's next? I've always heard good things that can result from registry cleaners, but anytime some one mentions registry I cringe at the thought as I've heard that tweaking the Windows registry can easily go wrong and possibly kill my computer. Is this true? How about registry cleaners? Ultimately what can a registry cleaner do for me? Will I benefit from it? Is it safe?