hi,
It didn’t seem like a few months ago my laptop was always so busy. Just to let you know I’m a onsite hardware tech- which makes it even harder asking for help, but I need this machine to play video without getting all choppy on me. And forget about having a chat program and a small game working at the same time.
Now I’ve run disk clean-up, defragmented, checked the hdd usuage (8GB out of 55). I know about programs that use up clock cycles because they are in the sys tray. I’ve even removed any unnecessary programs from the HDD. I’ve got 512MB of ram which has always been enough to say, play a youtube video or something along that line. I’ve scanned for viruses and whatnot using Norton, spybot search & destroy and adaware SE… still the load on my CPU is beyond what it should be in my opinion.
I can have a browser up and not do anything with it and watch the resource meter shoot from 4% to 90+%! Some-thing (program-wise) is keeping this machine busy and It’s killin’ me that I can’t get at it.
Is there anything I can run on my XP OSed laptop that would allow me to pick out what is using up some much of my resources?
I know I could get more memory, but 1) that costs money 2) I’ve never needed so much of my CPU to do what I normally do with the machine in the past so this would not be a fix, but rather a “workaround”
The odds are pretty good it’s a problem with Microsoft Updates. It’s a common problem that seems to affect laptops more than desktops. MS has been working on fixes for months now but haven’t gotten it yet. Try disabling the Automatic Updates service. If that cures it I can give you more suggestions.
Try the Panda Software or Trend Micro scanner, and check out Hijackthis to find out exactly what’s running (not sure if it’ll tell you what’s eating up your CPU). Norton never found goddamn anything. I had something like this and it turned out to be a some sort of virus/spyware, but I cant for the life of me remember what it was called (something like vongo, vengo, something bouncy with a v). The machine would hit 100%, heat up and crash every now and then.
If none of this or the advice that follows mine works, you might just want backup everything and reinstall windows.
Run the task manager and click on the process tab. At the top, click on “view” and pick “select columns”. You will get a window and in here check “cpu usage” and click “OK”. Now on the process list, click the “CPU” field on the title bar twice to sort the list in descending order on CPU usage. Now the lines at the top of the display will be the processes comsuming the most CPU time.
Memory is not going to fix anything unless you are swapping constantly which would be less processor intensive than running a full out app with sufficent RAM but slower due to the lag from drive access vs. RAM access times.