Member Avatar for jorgholt

Running a Dell E310, Windows XP, 160 G hard drive, external 500 G My Book, Xp partition is 117 G of 160, only 55% full.

When running Chuzzle, Ma Jong, mmorpg's, email, basically anything every 10 - 30 minutes it freezes/won't respond to mouse or keyboard input, won't update screen, just nothing for about 2 - 5 seconds; then goes back to normal. Task manager shows (sometimes) 95-100% cpu use, doesn't however keep a record of what was using so much cpu, then drops back to 2-10% cpu use.

Running AVG, Spybot Search and Destroy, WinPatrol and Ad Aware so don't "think" its spyware or virus/worm etc.

Any suggestions to procede in finding the cause?

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Dani AI

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A short, regular 2–5 second "hard" freeze with brief 95–100% CPU spikes usually narrows the cause to one of three areas: a user process briefly monopolizing CPU, kernel/driver DPC or interrupt spikes, or storage I/O stalls. The pointers from , and are useful starting ideas; below are focused, XP‑appropriate diagnostics to isolate which of those it is and where to look next.

Run two quick isolation checks first: boot a clean environment (a Linux live USB or Windows PE) for several hours to see if the freezes continue — if they do, hardware is likely. Run a full RAM pass with MemTest86 and check drive SMART data (internal and the external My Book) with a SMART utility; failing RAM or a drive with reallocated sectors often causes intermittent hangs. MemTest86: https://www.memtest86.com/ — CrystalDiskInfo/smartctl are good SMART options (https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/).

If the problem looks software/driver related, capture what the system actually does during a spike. Use Process Explorer to watch for a user process or the kernel/interrupts consuming CPU; if no user process shows, kernel/driver activity is likely. Process Explorer and Procdump are useful for capturing evidence: Process Explorer (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer); Procdump for dumps (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procdump). If the kernel looks guilty, run a DPC/ISR latency tool such as LatencyMon to identify the offending driver (https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon).

Also keep firmware/drivers up to date (chipset/storage/USB), test with the external drive disconnected, and, if comfortable, log counters with Performance Monitor (CPU %, disk queue length) to correlate timestamps. These steps will separate hardware from driver/process causes and generate the diagnostic data needed to fix the root issue.

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Member Avatar for caperjack

not sure what it can be but in device manager ,go to View ,select columns and check off peak memory usage ,this will show what they all maxed out at !might give some clue as to whats doing it .
also you could check event viewer for errors ,
type this into start/"run"
eventvwr.msc

Member Avatar for abel2b

How much ram is in your system...

Usually spybot search and destroy teatimer will cause this, also microsoft search indexer will do this on systems with low RAM.

Try to find out what process is the resource hungry that loads the machine...

Member Avatar for crb3

Also, just to make sure it's not malware, unplug the machine from your Internet connection and work that way normally for a few hours as a test. If the problem seems to go away, you can suspect that you've been pwned. All the virus / spyware / trojan checker companies play catchup with the guys who write those things, so it could be one they aren't yet detecting.

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