CPU is maxing out for no obvious reason - Asus/AMD 1.1

[TigersHere]

I hope someone here has a clue as I have tried all of the driver updates.
I was going to blame this on Windows ME but I am not sure now as I just had the behavior happen on SE but not as bad.

Specifics, the CPU ( kernal ) when you are NOT doing anything will peg out to 100% and stay there.
Some times it will go to 50 and not drop or higher.
On Windows ME the 100 % was happening on every boot IF I left the system idle for as little as 2 minutes.
I could still be downloading and it goes to 100%
No locking up but it's slow as glue when that happens of course.
Restarting fixes it just like it would if it was a resource drain.

I have a AMD thunderbird 1.1 gig with the ASUS A7V with their latest bios or the latest one that I saw there.
IBM 45 gig drive with the Promise Ata100 controller on the ASUS.
I updated those drivers as well and that fixed a slow boot up I was having.
Video card is a Creative Annihilator GeForce 256 DDR. blah
It's not the card I ordered and the GTX is on the way but I am stuck with this for now.
SB live MP3 sound card
Plextor 12/10/32 CD-RW and a ASUS - 50 plain CD - ROM
256 MB of Error correcting 133 Mz RAM and that's it I guess

One note that is odd
I was running Media player and it was streaming audio nice and almost no CPU usage on Windows SE
When I closed the player it would go up to 40 % of CPU and I had closed all apps down

Last note, and one that I am waiting on too and this might be the problem but I don't know
The modem is a software modem ( I ordered a external but it's backordered as well ) so the generic motorola is installed.
Drivers for it as well were updated.

I was getting the max CPU without even loading up anything actually on ME
I used msconfig and unchecked everything but systray and scanreg to see if any powerprofile was causing this....or screen saver and it's none of that

So, opinions are welcome
Is it ASUS vs AMD or that crappy modem or both ?

Thanks for reading this mess

Tiger:disgust:

 

[UberJumper]

Did you run a virus scan? Do you have any software running if you bring up the task list?

UberJumper

 

[TigersHere]

Yea, tried everything
System was new and did this before anything happened
scanned though with the latest from avp.com and that's a good source
But, I deleted everything from the start up in msconfig to be sure I had a clean boot.
Left the room for 5, came back and the CPU hit 100%.
It's odd!

98 SE seems more stable for sure so I am hoping it's just some patch I need or a setting :/

Argh!!!
Ya get all of this new stuff and then it's just a headache!

Thanks
Tiger

 

[holdencommodore]

Most of the time the CPU load should be at 100% (it is on my system anyway). It is only if the performance is adversely affected that you would have to worry.

Is your modem a SM56 Motorola Winmodem? This will use the CPU for data processing, and therefore a high CPU usage.

 

[TigersHere]

modem a SM56 Motorola Winmodem? This will use the CPU for data processing, and therefore a high CPU usage. >>.

Yep, but it's not pulling that hard now
And when it's at 100 % everything slows down
I can't scandisk or defrag or anything like that
It's like I am on a 486 again!
ACK!!!!!!

Yes, performance is nuked :/
Thanks!
Tiger

 

[Chris A]

If you are running 98 you might give this program a run it will help identify what is sucking up the resorces.. http://www.naples.net/ftparea1/ftp_files/wintop.zip

 

[Techwhore]

You shouldn't run scandisk in windows anyway, always in DOS... as for defrag, i'm sure you know that u can't run anything in the background, nothing at all... or else it will do nothing and take forever to do it too.

 

[TigersHere]

No, I didn't run scanreg
There is a scanregw that runs everything you start 98 to scan and back up your reg
It slows ya down but it makes 1 of 5 copies in case you needto restore one

No, ya can't run either of those at the same time and that's what I meant
I turned off everything in the start up except those too
But it's not a deep scan, it takes like 1 second on start up
Everyones 98 has it in there unless they find it and nuke it.
They are stored in the sysback folder I think , the backups


Thanks
Tiger

 

[AC]

u could try brute force ...just kiddin'. i hate it when my systems runs like snails... even worse is when i can't figure out why...

check irq assignments

if u did a clean install of ME with nothing else, your system should be running like a bullet...

 

[TigersHere]

Yea I did a clean install of ME and SE
I nuked everything, FDISK and all

Installed the barest things but then started noticing this odd CPU overload and mostly on ME
It's running fine on my old Pent II 400, the CPU monitor does what I expect
Load a program or run one and the CPU pulls, stop and it goes down
This is not what's happening on the new system
It's not letting the CPU go near idle and it will just jump to 100% and stay there on ME especially
and more lock ups than normal. Mostly when I come back and the screen saver has kicked in.
But, that same screen saver caused me narrow a problem running 24/7 for over a year so it should not now, on a MUCH faster system with more RAM and faster video
So that's the killer :/
I am using tried and true things, the only new is the Hardware, the software I am fully aware of how to tweak it and get it to run fast and reliable.
Except on this new machine!
I ran SE for 18 months and after installing hundreds of beta programs and app's it still ran fine
It was buried in old dlls and stuff the reg was over 10k but it was fine!
This one is not fine :/

The 400 is running great now that I formatted it and got rid of all of that reg bloat.
Oh, and yes I ran reg utils to clean it and optimize it often
Still worked like a charm!
Usually I don't touch those programs that do that but they worked then
They should work now I would think!

Thanks a lot
Tiger

 

[Rakkis]

Was the modem in the system when it was runnign fine?
More generic software modems tend to slow down performance a *lot*. Try taking the modem outto see if that's the problem.