I've got a laptop at work that, for the most part, runs just fine. But several times a week (three times so far this week) will just go schitzo.
The symptoms are: The user will have a couple of tabs open in IE - the corporate intranet, Google and Pandora - all the time. After several hours, the mouse will begin to jump instead of being smooth. When I look, task manager shows the CPU usage at 100%, with IE using right at or just under 50%. (The laptop is running a Core 2 Duo processor, so IE is consuming 100% of one of the cores.) Once I shut down IE, after a couple of seconds, things begin to settle down. But as soon as IE is fired up, the CPU usage spikes again. The only help I've been able to provide so far is a reboot, which delays the symptoms for a couple of hours.
So far, I have confirmed that Windows, Windows 7 Pro x86 SP1 in this case, is up to date (I even upgraded IE from 8 to 9) and it is. I have confirmed that Flash, Java, Shockwave, and Silverlight are all up to date - which they are. I have made sure that the Anti-Virus (McAfee Enterprise Edition) is up to date and ran a scan which found nothing. I have installed Malwarebytes and ran a scan, which found nothing. I have cleaned up the temporary files - both system and Internet - with CCleaner. As a last ditch effort, I installed Firefox yesterday evening. I did this just to see if the problem happened with a different browser. No word yet as to the outcome of that.
Now, a few things to note:
1). This is a company laptop. There is a policy in place that *requires* the user to use IE, so suggestions about switching to another browser simply won't help me. As soon as I can confirm whether this is browser dependent or not (by the use of Firefox), I'll have to remove Firefox.
2). As a matter of general practice, the user normally has several other applications running at the same time - the typical office type things, Word, Excel, Outlook, Acrobat, Calculator, an instant messenger (internal only, and older version of Lync), etc. which also consume CPU time, hence the combined 100% use when the problem occurs.
3). The machine has 4 GB of RAM. But in every occurrence, I've only ever seen it use around 2 GB (according to Task Manager). As far as I can tell, this is not related to lack of memory or disk swapping.
4). There doesn't appear to be any hardware defects - the machine is just shy of being 3 years old. I will be running some hardware diagnostics today, just to make sure, but I doubt I'm going to find anything.
I think the problem revolves around the Pandora tab and therefore, FLASH. The Google page is opened by everyone else in the company at various times and no one else is reporting issues. The corporate intranet page is a simple thing that I coded several years ago with PHP and all it does is collect time data and store it in a database. Nothing fancy going on there. As far as IE, it only has the typical add-ins installed (Flash, Silverlight, Shockwave, and Acrobat's reader plugin). We use Google for searches and there are no toolbars or accelerators installed.
I've searched Google until my eyes bled and the only thing I can find is one post on Adobe's Flash Forums last year about version 11.0 of the Flash Player causing stumbles, jittery playback and CPU spikes on low-power, multi-core CPUs. It fits the bill, but we're using version 11.6.x of Flash player now...can it still be a bug?
Anyone else have some idea as to what I can look for to try to solve the problem?
The symptoms are: The user will have a couple of tabs open in IE - the corporate intranet, Google and Pandora - all the time. After several hours, the mouse will begin to jump instead of being smooth. When I look, task manager shows the CPU usage at 100%, with IE using right at or just under 50%. (The laptop is running a Core 2 Duo processor, so IE is consuming 100% of one of the cores.) Once I shut down IE, after a couple of seconds, things begin to settle down. But as soon as IE is fired up, the CPU usage spikes again. The only help I've been able to provide so far is a reboot, which delays the symptoms for a couple of hours.
So far, I have confirmed that Windows, Windows 7 Pro x86 SP1 in this case, is up to date (I even upgraded IE from 8 to 9) and it is. I have confirmed that Flash, Java, Shockwave, and Silverlight are all up to date - which they are. I have made sure that the Anti-Virus (McAfee Enterprise Edition) is up to date and ran a scan which found nothing. I have installed Malwarebytes and ran a scan, which found nothing. I have cleaned up the temporary files - both system and Internet - with CCleaner. As a last ditch effort, I installed Firefox yesterday evening. I did this just to see if the problem happened with a different browser. No word yet as to the outcome of that.
Now, a few things to note:
1). This is a company laptop. There is a policy in place that *requires* the user to use IE, so suggestions about switching to another browser simply won't help me. As soon as I can confirm whether this is browser dependent or not (by the use of Firefox), I'll have to remove Firefox.
2). As a matter of general practice, the user normally has several other applications running at the same time - the typical office type things, Word, Excel, Outlook, Acrobat, Calculator, an instant messenger (internal only, and older version of Lync), etc. which also consume CPU time, hence the combined 100% use when the problem occurs.
3). The machine has 4 GB of RAM. But in every occurrence, I've only ever seen it use around 2 GB (according to Task Manager). As far as I can tell, this is not related to lack of memory or disk swapping.
4). There doesn't appear to be any hardware defects - the machine is just shy of being 3 years old. I will be running some hardware diagnostics today, just to make sure, but I doubt I'm going to find anything.
I think the problem revolves around the Pandora tab and therefore, FLASH. The Google page is opened by everyone else in the company at various times and no one else is reporting issues. The corporate intranet page is a simple thing that I coded several years ago with PHP and all it does is collect time data and store it in a database. Nothing fancy going on there. As far as IE, it only has the typical add-ins installed (Flash, Silverlight, Shockwave, and Acrobat's reader plugin). We use Google for searches and there are no toolbars or accelerators installed.
I've searched Google until my eyes bled and the only thing I can find is one post on Adobe's Flash Forums last year about version 11.0 of the Flash Player causing stumbles, jittery playback and CPU spikes on low-power, multi-core CPUs. It fits the bill, but we're using version 11.6.x of Flash player now...can it still be a bug?
Anyone else have some idea as to what I can look for to try to solve the problem?
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