Vanity: 100% CPU usage

self | 141023 | Sherman Logan

[Sherman Logan]

I have a Dell notebook that's about 5 years old. Windows 7.

It works fine most of the time, but every few hours it goes into a mode where the CPU goes straight to 100% usage and stays there, making it unusable.

Sometimes it self corrects after 15 minutes or an hour, or sometimes I have to do a hard reboot.

Then it works fine again for a while.

Any suggestions?

[RedStateRocker]

Maybe so, but it will work and a lot of the time it’s what you end up doing anyway.

[zeugma]

These people are just stealing your money on the pretense that they stop viral attacks. They don’t tell you they stop it by STOPPING you from frigging doing anything on your computer.

WIth my work, I have to use a laptop with Win7 on it. It is loaded down with AV stuff. Every single day, I get to take a 30 minute break when the AV kicks in running a full disk scan. The laptop is useless while it's running.

Of course, the first thing I did when I got the laptop was to install a copy of VMWare on it, and installed a linux box in the VM so I could get some actual work done when the AV wasn't running. I don't see how anyone gets any real work done in windows.  To each his own, but it just doesn't suit the way I work, and the command prompt is a joke of the first measure. I have no interest in learning 'powershell' (yeah, microsoft finally discovers the usefulness of a real shell that will let you script actual work), because I can do anything I need/want to do in Bash. I'm also a heavy user of multiple desktops. Windows just doesn't cut it for me.

For those who like it, more power to them. I just wish I didn't have to work around so much flat out windows-centric stupidity in the corporate world.

[zeugma]

That’s what I always did when I had Windows based machines. It’s really quite easy to do a full restore once you get the process down and after the first one (for myself at least) there was a noticeable improvement in performance.

Are you able to restore your desktop preferences and stuff? I've never seen anyone able to restore anything more than user files on a windows box.

[sloop]

this user is not running unix

this user does not want to run unix

[Gaffer]

Well. From personal experience I can tell you that foregoing the ‘protection’ of these two AntiViral Giants isn’t a consideration taken lightly. But I CAN tell you the freedom resulting from their death on my computers has been refreshing. This isn’t to say I don’t protect my information, but it is not be all and end all of the point of having a computer in the first place.

I protect my identity, and I never store passwords or click on crap in emails I don’t know. I don’t go to porn sights, and I don’t go to Huffpo or wherever. I also have separate identity protection and any valued account is set with trigger emails that tell me immediately if any purchase has been made. It is freedom, and it isn’t from either one of these two giant Time Vampires.

[Gaffer]

I have a garage refrigerator. Every once in a while I’ll pull out both cars, push the fridge out in the center and drop the back cover and take my yard blower to it full bore, 130 MPH....it still purrs like a kitten and keeps stuff cold, cold, cold.

[FourtySeven]

To answer your question in brief “no”.

When I said I did a full “restore” I misspoke. I was actually talking about doing a hard drive wipe (via the quick reformat available when the system boots up) and then loading the OS and all other programs I wanted back on.

Like I said though it’s pretty easy once you know what you’re doing. The quick format option is good enough for this purpose. Typically took a Sunday afternoon of work. The longest step was updating Windows to the latest service packs.

This of course wiped any desktop preferences. I never kept any such prefs anyway; I always just used the default settings for my desktop. But I imagine such prefs could be saved somehow as a file to load at the end of the process. I don’t know how successful that would be as I never did it.

[Jack Hydrazine]

Better to use Super Anti Spyware or Anti Malware Bytes apps to get rid of those viruses.

[TexasRepublic]

Not long before Microsoft dropped support for XP, a number of PCs at work were suddenly maxing out at 100%. Long story short, an automatic Windows update introduced a faulty patch, and the machines were from that point on were stuck, looking for updates in the wrong place. I had to disable automatic updates in each computer to make them usable. Microsoft finally issued a corrective patch right before support expired. I suggest you comb the support forums looking for another MS blunder of that sort.

Thankfully, I don’t have to use MS products at home, I have better things to do.

[PieterCasparzen]

Question about cleaning the vents. Isn’t the method you suggest simply blowing the dust deeper into the laptop?

I know I need to clean my vents but really don’t know my options besides for a can of air.

(W.).... I found a disassembly guide here for Toshiba, but they're all similar.

Every few years, do that complete disassembly/clean, I concur. You'll need isopropyl (very pure) alcohol and few other things - as W says, use the guide for your machine which today you can usually find online quickly. It's generally a bit of blowing, followed by wiping and detailed cleaning. Not that difficult when all is disassembled; just have to be careful not to break or lose parts, like a surgeon.

My experience with the dust though was a complete system crash with no message or log, as the system board was short-circuiting across components. After the cleaning, no probs.

For the cpu-100% problem, you've got a runaway program running, as I said elsewhere, probably your browser rendering a nasty webpage, or some malware.

I found sites that were linking to ad servers which made the sites behave very badly when I would not let them store cookies.

[csvset]

Saw this video from Sandia Lab's YouTube channel.

Sandia Cooler

The Sandia Cooler is 30-times more efficient than conventional air-cooled heat exchangers and is available for licensing to electronics and solid state lighting cooling manufacturers.

[zeugma]

To answer your question in brief “no”.

When I said I did a full “restore” I misspoke. I was actually talking about doing a hard drive wipe (via the quick reformat available when the system boots up) and then loading the OS and all other programs I wanted back on.

That's what I thought. It's a major design failure IMO.

When you restore on a linux/unix box, you just restore /home and all your desktop stuff magically reappears just as it was.

From what I understand Macs work pretty much the same way. All user customization goes in the home directory and is restored without having to jump through extraordinary hoops.

AmP

[WillVoteForFood]

Not running more than one antivirus program, correct? Antivirus programs do not play nice with each other.

When your computer is idle, is it on any particular page(s). Note if you happen to be on a page that automatically fires either flash video or a lot of flash ads. Both will send your CPU through the roof. Poor performance can happen on a such a page whether on a Mac or PC.

Firefox has been notorious for a while imo for producing a browser that is a bit of a pig. I use pretty much every browser for my work and have found Firefox to consistently be the poorest performing, even when compared with IE 10 and 11.

Do you have a bunch of seemingly little utility programs running on your machine in your task bar? There may be stuff you have had since you have had your machine that you really do not need to be running at startup.

And of course as others have said, check your processes and look for one eating up your CPU or memory (or both).

[zeugma]

The Sandia Cooler is 30-times more efficient than conventional air-cooled heat exchangers and is available for licensing to electronics and solid state lighting cooling manufacturers.

That would work well in my case. Any idea if anyone is selling it as a bolt-on?

[csvset]

I don't know if it's at the retail level yet. They have some cool videos. I like how they explain the stuff that they do there in layman's terms .

I saw their zoom scope for rifles.

RAZAR Adaptive Zoom Rifle Scope

[RBStealth]

Doh! You should have gotten
PC Matic® now with SuperShield