Members philbo Posted February 1, 2010 Members Share Posted February 1, 2010 My girlfriend has a Dell PC running XP Pro that intermittently hangs (pauses for 2 or 3 minutes with 100% CPU load). I tried looking at what task is hanging with Task Manager, but it provided no clues. However, Process Explorer revealed that the CPU cores are completely tied up with interrupts. Anybody run into this before? Should I maybe pull it apart, clean & reseat all the cards? Or search for a rogue driver? Any hints or ideas would be appreciated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Coaster Posted February 1, 2010 Members Share Posted February 1, 2010 spyware? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Phait Posted February 1, 2010 Members Share Posted February 1, 2010 Check the temperatures too http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/coretempcoretemp/coretemp.html Try http://www.spywareterminator.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members nat whilk II Posted February 1, 2010 Members Share Posted February 1, 2010 Many many things use the interrupts, and if more than one device is trying to use the same interrupt, the conflict can hangs thing up. Easiest first things to try are the peripherals and such plugged in. CD/DVD drives can really hang up a system. If it's clogged, just open and close each drive door in succession. Remove and re-plug USB devices. Try them in different USB slots than before. (Do all this one at a time to help you identify any culprit). Any new software installed? New peripheral? If so, you can use System Restore to take the system back to where it was before the new install. If the problem goes away, you will also have a clue as the source. Then move on to figuring out what's running on the machine in the background. Run a little program from the "Run" command line - just type in msconfig and you'll get a handy screen that shows you everything that loads on bootup. Uncheck the boxes of all unnecessary programs that load at boot. New software will often load up a few programs at boot, the kind of thing that just makes load time a bit quicker, or polls the internet for updates, etc. Adobe programs are bad about this. Also Intuit programs. Trial and error....the usual prescription. Good luck! nat whilk ii Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Jon Gnash Posted February 1, 2010 Members Share Posted February 1, 2010 Should I maybe pull it apart, clean & reseat all the cards?Yes. Do that. Or just leave the cards out for a while - while you diagnose the problem. According to Microsoft Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members WRGKMC Posted February 1, 2010 Members Share Posted February 1, 2010 If you're running Vista it can very well be an indexing issue. When I first got Vista it started hanging like that. I installed a copy of Fix It Utilities and cleand up and defragmented the registry, cleand up all the junk files etc and the thing took off like a bat outta hell. I now do a cleanup about once every month and dont have any hangs like that anymore. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ggm1960 Posted February 1, 2010 Members Share Posted February 1, 2010 My Dell 8400 3Ghz P4 started locking up a week ago. It was really dirty so I pulled the CPU fan out and really cleaned it up. I also reseated the simm modules. Seemed to do the trick for the time being. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted February 1, 2010 Members Share Posted February 1, 2010 Many many things use the interrupts, and if more than one device is trying to use the same interrupt, the conflict can hangs thing up.Easiest first things to try are the peripherals and such plugged in.CD/DVD drives can really hang up a system. If it's clogged, just open and close each drive door in succession. Remove and re-plug USB devices. Try them in different USB slots than before. (Do all this one at a time to help you identify any culprit).Any new software installed? New peripheral? If so, you can use System Restore to take the system back to where it was before the new install. If the problem goes away, you will also have a clue as the source.Then move on to figuring out what's running on the machine in the background. Run a little program from the "Run" command line - just type in msconfig and you'll get a handy screen that shows you everything that loads on bootup. Uncheck the boxes of all unnecessary programs that load at boot. New software will often load up a few programs at boot, the kind of thing that just makes load time a bit quicker, or polls the internet for updates, etc. Adobe programs are bad about this. Also Intuit programs. Trial and error....the usual prescription.Good luck! nat whilk ii Lots of good advice. I'll second the notion that (for me on XP) hang-ups have often been related to optical media drives not being ready or having flawed discs in them. (My PC is also my entertainment center and I have a whole lot of DVDs recorded off broadcast. Mostly my DVD burner was pretty reliable but every once in a while, it would burn a disk with an error that would either lock up playback or, if I was trying to copy the file(s) to hard drive, to slow down and eventually lock up file transfer. Also, while most third party background processes typically only drag down system performance and make it sluggish, occasionally a bad actor will take the whole show down. If the computer was from a major vendor (Dell, Sony, HP, Acer, etc), chances are it was shipped with jillions of such crapware background programs installed and loaded at boot. (OK, maybe not jillions -- but the last new Dell machine I set up had 79 backround processes -- while something between 20 and 30 is much more like what is normally necessary. Most of that crapware is pretty much completely unnecesary -- and much of it makes unconscionable demans on system resources. For instance: lots of folks like Sun Microsystems -- but their Java package automatically installs a 'Java Updater' that sits in background, waiting to phone home every once in a while just to see if there's been an update. That sounds innocent enough -- except that the POS takes as much as 12 or more MB of system RAM. Just sitting there. My first computer had about one tenth that much RAM and it was, you know, capable of running just about any program out there... Yet the geniuses at Sun have to devote 12 MB of my system RAM just to have a utility that checks for updates every once in a while? Incredible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members aliensporebomb Posted February 1, 2010 Members Share Posted February 1, 2010 A recent update by microsoft has made older XP machines hang up at 100% cpu for long periods of time. We're still trying to figure out WHY this is happening but there was a longstanding but with the Windows Update service that would do similar things. Basically: if you don't have a double core or more CPU or if you're on an old single core CPU you're hosed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members John Sayers Posted February 1, 2010 Members Share Posted February 1, 2010 If you're running Vista it can very well be an indexing issue. When I first got Vista it started hanging like that. I installed a copy of Fix It Utilities and cleand up and defragmented the registry, cleand up all the junk files etc and the thing took off like a bat outta hell. I now do a cleanup about once every month and dont have any hangs like that anymore. glad to see someone else uses fixit tuneup utilities - great program mine checks my whole system once a week. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members philbo Posted February 2, 2010 Author Members Share Posted February 2, 2010 Thanks all. Still running XP. Wouldn't touch Vista with a 10 foot pole. The video card is a good tip... I'd already killed all the non-usual startup items with msconfig.. but that's a good idea too. The spyware thing didn't have a very smooth install, but finally started & found one item.... I'll see how it goes I guess. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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