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100% CPU Usage - Can't Find the Problem

S

Shade00

Member
Hey guys, I've got a really annoying problem. I recently upgraded my old T-bird 1ghz with a new A7N266-VM mobo and Athlon XP 1600+ processor. I installed a fresh copy of XP and now it seems that my System process is taking up 100% of my cpu, all the time. Even after rebooting, I still can't get it to work. I've done some research and apparently the most frequent cause of this problem is a bad driver, but I can't find out how to pinpoint the culprit. Any help will be appreciated! It's annoying to have my newer components running slower than my old ones. 🙁

Here are my system specs:
Asus A7N266-VM mobo
Athlon XP 1600+
512 Mb PC 2100 DDR
PNY GeForce4 Ti 4200
WD 40gb hard drive

I also have an extra network card installed.
 
I just had this problem with an HP printer driver. I started by stopping the system tray items one by one, which fixed my problem. HP had a icon system tray and was the problem. Then I would try to disable each device one by one in the profile. This should work until you get down to the basics. After that it gets a little harder.
 
Also....if you have a CPU cooling program installed....CPUIdle in particular....it uses all idle processes to keep the CPU temp down by issuing a HALT command to it...Windows Task Manager misinterprets this idle usage and reports it as 100% CPU Usage, when in fact it truly isn't....if thats the case....don't worry about it....evrything is fine and normal. 😉

Regards
 
Have you done Windows Update to make sure you have the newest drivers for your hardware, and specifically, your processor? -TAL
 
Peacekeeper: I'll try going with each device and seeing how that goes.

LuckeeDogg: No CPU cooling software is installed. And it's not just tricking Windows... the system runs noticeably slow. If I try to open a second Internet Explorer window it bogs down.

Tal: Yep, I've been through Windows Update, updated drivers for everything I've got. I've tried every version of the mobo's drivers but to no avail. If Peacekeeper's suggestion doesn't work I might be looking at reformatting again. I wanted to avoid that. 🙁

If anyone knows a way I can see what the parent/children of the System process are that could help. I need to find out what drivers are taking up my resources inside of the System process. Thanks again guys.
 
Open Task Manager by ALT TAB DEL, select task manager then processes and look for the offending program/software.
 
The offending process is the System process itself. It's up to 99 all the time, and in Task Manager, it shows 100% cpu usage constantly. If some other program was causing the problem, it might not be so difficult, but I fear it may be a device driver.
 
I had a similar problem at one point but it turned out to be a software program (not driver related). A program called gmt.exe was causing the problem. Once I ended its process the problem stopped.

HTH
 
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