A few weeks ago, one of my computers (a Windows 98 system) started performing really badly. I tried to diagnose the problem and discovered that the processor was running at 100% of capacity, all the time, even when the computer was doing nothing but running the system monitor that tells you how much the processor is being used.
My first thought was a virus. However, I have run two different, current, anti-virus programs on it and both found nothing. This is driving me nuts! Any suggestions?
Have you tried adaware? http://www.lavasoftusa.com
You might have some crazy spyware installed.
If you’ve done this already, using the Task Manager, find out which process is using up your processor…then do a seach in google using the name of that process. That should bring up some links where people have had similar problems.
There are other similar programs to adaware that would probably be worth sourcing, but I only use the above.
I don’t believe W98 has Task Manager. How did you determine your CPU utilization to start with? There is a program under W98 that will show you all running processes (some viruses might be smart enough to elude even this), but I don’t think it shows CPU utilization like Task Manager does. I’m not at my W98 box at the moment but I think it’s something like MSINFO32. Check under your Windows\system directory for .exe files that look like this.
The last time it happened to me, the culprit was a blank CD-R disk in the drive. Apparently the system spent all the resources trying to read it.
Windows 98 has a “System Monitor” which can display various things including Kernel: Processor Usage. This is what is running at 100% all the time.
I actually tried doing a control-Alt-Delete and turning off every process, one at a time, to see if I could figure out what was using all the CPU time. Every time I shut down a task, there was a brief dip in processor usage which quickly ramped back up to 100%.
I’ll try this adaware thing. I hadn’t considered spyware, though I would have thought that killing off all the tasks would have revealed it.
Oh, and I checked, unfortunately, there’s nothing in the DVD drive. If it had only been so easy!
Something else you can think of doing is run MSCONFIG and turn off any “suspicious” looking programs from your start-up process.
See if that helps.