The past few days I’ve noticed that my computer (Desktop, Windows XP Pro Edition, all service packs installed) has been running quite a bit slower than normal. I checked on Process Explorer , and found that from 12% to 30% of the CPU is being taken up by a process called “Interrupts”, described in Process Explorer as “Hardware Interrupts and DPC’s”. Now I have a vague idea of the concept of these interrupts, but not enough to analyze this. They have never been a problem before, nor such a resource hog.
Have run Malwarebytes, without finding anything. If anyone of this Board has an idea about what this is, I would really appreciate your input.
I opened the “Event Viewer”, and evidently don’t understand how that is supposed to help. All I was able to see is a whole bunch of options like Application, Security, System, and so forth, and opening these leads one to another bunch of options, none of which I could find that mentions Interrupts. I guess I’m not a good enough computer nerd to figure this one out. If you have any further advice here I’m all ears.
Here is the wikipedia page on interrupts. Ever wonder how the processor knows how to stop what it is doing and handle a keystroke or a mouse click of data from a disk? The device posts an interrupt, which causes the cpu to transfer control to an interrupt handler which processes the request. So if a device is posting too many interrupts for some reason, performance of a program may suffer.
Back when I was in college everyone learned how to write interrupt routines. I guess that this isn’t taught any more.
Like Isider said, often a messed-up hard drive is the most likely culprit.
A possible fix for this is a complete backuo, low-level reformat, and reimaging.
Or even a full defrag & disk cleanup (the type that takes 10-20 hours to run) may improve things.
You want system, the latest events,
look for a lot of “red” events, occurring recently.
is there like a flood of events ? 100 a minute or 1000 an hour or something ?
Well check what the latest Red events are , or what the flood is about
Also, does anyone know why the formatting chosen in writing a message on SD is not preserved after the message is submitted? I really did a neater job of writing the message than it looks like to you guys.