CPU overusage

[gordanfreeman]

the past week or so i have been unable to play any semi-recent game due to the game exe eating up all of my cpu power. from the moment i start up the game the cpu usage goes up to 100 (or just short of) until i quit the game. my system has run neverwinter nights just fine for months until this problem started about a week and a half ago. the same thing happened when i tried to start up the guild wars beta this past weekend and also when i try to play rise of nations. the menu screens for the games seem to run just fine (altho checking the task manager shows 100% cpu usage) and once you enter the game it is either extremely choppy and unplayable or basically freezes up until i ctrl-alt-del or alt-tab out of the game and close the program.

this is what i am running:
athlon xp 2600+ underclocked to ~1.5ghz (had some stability prob's in past w/ the audigy card, underclocking fixed it)
Asus a7v8x-x mobo bios rev 12 (no not up to date but i have been running w/out problems since before the latest rev came out
768 MB DDR @ 333mhz (off brand)
GeForce 4 Ti 4200 128mb
Audigy 2 ZS Sound Card
Antec TruBlue 480 PSU
80gb Maxtor 7200RPM HDD (system, primary)
120gb WD 7200RPM HDD (storage, slave)
52x CDRW drive
16x DVD-ROM
Win 2k Pro ser. pack 4

the problem only shows up while playing games (altho for some reason firing up day of defeat through steam had no problem...), in order to get even somewhat similar results while running regular apps i loaded up: firefox, netlimiter, bcdc++ (while uploading files), winamp, adaware (scanning), diskkeeper light (doing a defrag), MS word, msn messenger, aim, photoshop (few images loaded), antivir (scanning), teamspeak, and motherboard monitor

even while running all that simultaniously the cpu usage isnt consistently 100% (as it is when loading those other programs). i have been scanning and rescanning w/ multiple apps for virus/spyware etc with no luck for the past few days.

short of formatting (which i cannot do atm due to a faulty system install cd) is there anything else i could check?

 

[gordanfreeman]

update: up'ed the bios to 1013 from 1012, problem persists
also tried going down from 71.84 to 56.72 on my video drivers with no luck

 

[gordanfreeman]

noone has any ideas? of all the forums i visit i expect at least something out of the people here at anandtech :/

 

[SilthDraeth]

Well, you said the problem started about a week and a half ago... think real hard, and tell us what exactly happened a week and a half ago? Did you install/uninstall anything?
Have you tried running a registry fix? ie: Registry Mechanic.
ygpm

 

[gordanfreeman]

only thing that happened around that time i could think of has been uninstalled multiple times.

ill try a reg fix i suppose...

 

[SilthDraeth]

uninstalled multiple times? As in same prog? Or multiple progs? and That sounds like something that could corrupt your registry.

 

[gordanfreeman]

was actually a codec but only tried the uninstall/reinstall after the problem already existed

 

[gordanfreeman]

registry clean didnt work

 

[fuzzynavel]

There was another thread on the anandtech forums a few days ago with 100% CPU usage and the problem seemed to be the 71.xx nvidia drivers!! but he couldn't clear them out properly!

 

[LTC8K6]

Driver cleaner to remove the video drivers?

 

[gordanfreeman]

hmmm i dont remember if i had upgraded the vid drivers before or after the problem started but i have since downgraded to 5x.xx drivers i think. what is this driver cleaner you speak of? i will have to try that...

 

[Calin]

Neverwinter nights haven't worked after I installed dx9 on WinXP. Good that the older WinXP partition still had DX8

 

[gordanfreeman]

do you use the expansions? i am pretty sure i have been running dX9 for... gosh i cant even remember how long but never had a problem w/ NWN, but then i have had the expansions for almost a year now, maybe that makes a difference?

 

[manno]

is it crunching away at the harddrive? how much free space do you have? how long have you played before giving up? I had a simmilar probem once I couldn't for the life of me figure it out then I right-clicked on my computer and noticed the ammount of reccognised memory was 1/2 of what it should of been. turns out one of my Dimms kicked the bucket, and I was doing a lot of work on the swap file.

 

[gordanfreeman]

i have waited a good 10 maybe 15 minutes once or twice on some games, but usually only a couple (its not very entertaining to watch a slide show of your game with a new pic once every 15-30 seconds)

as for the memory, my computer is still recognizing all 786 mb of it.

 

[gordanfreeman]

ok i managed to format my main HDD now, and the problem still persists altho i only have had the chance to try it with one game (rise of nations)

i am worried i am looking at a hardware issue now. any ideas?

 

[Jeff7]

How do you check the CPU usage while in the game? If you go back to the desktop to check Task Manager, that might mess up the game - each game handles that switch differently. Some just outright crash, some experience a slowdown on return, and a few don't seem to care.

 

[blatherbeard]

A friend of mine had this same problem. They both bought the exact same pc and only one of them had this problem while playing Call of Duty. He never found the specific problem but he ended up putting a new video card in and more memory and has not had that same problem since. May be just a fluke or something corrected itself but thats what happened.

Im not real technical but i know enough to get myself into trouble. lol

 

[gordanfreeman]

i check the cpu useage with the task manager. but i only check after the extreme slowdown starts. NWN becomes a literal slideshow, rise of nations freezes up for 10-20 seconds every minute or so... this is a new occurance, it just started one day. i was able to bring up the task manager while in these games in the past.