CPU Maxed Out?
There's probably something amiss.
Lincoln Spector
Tuesday, December 28, 2004 05:00 PM PST

I recently received the following question from April Turkett of Morristown, Tennessee.

Two days ago my CPU usage jumped to 100 percent, slowing the computer beyond use. Any ideas on what happened and what to do about it?


An overloaded CPU can make a PC unbearably slow. If the CPU spikes happen rarely and correct themselves quickly, don't worry about it. But if they keep coming back or don't go away, you have to find out what's wrong and fix it.

The most obvious culprit is a virus, spyware, or some other malicious software. Scan your system regularly with a good spy-catching program such as Lavasoft's Ad-Aware or Patrick M. Kolla's Spybot Search & Destroy. They're free, so why not download and use both of them? Next, update your antivirus definitions and run a full virus scan. Set your antivirus program to check for updates and do a full scan automatically at least once a week.

If virus and spyware scans don't find the problem, it may be due to a malware program that's too new to be caught. More likely, however, is an unintended problem with an honest program.

If your system's CPU spike is constant, the software at fault probably loads when Windows boots. Select Start, Run
, type msconfig, and press Enter. Click the Startup
tab, uncheck suspicious options one at a time, and reboot until the problem stops. Windows 2000 lacks this utility; for this OS, download Startup Control Panel, Mike Lin's free alternative.

If the processor overload occurs intermittently, note what you're doing each time the system slows down: the programs you're running, the Web sites you visited that day, and so on. This information may give you a clue.

In Windows XP and 2000, the Task Manager can show you what's chewing up CPU cycles. Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete (in Windows 2000, click Task Manager
). Choose Processes
to see your running programs and subroutines. The CPU column shows the available CPU cycles that each process is running. You can easily find the problem here. The Performance tab shows your CPU usage. Hover the cursor over the Task Manager icon in your system tray to see the current CPU usage in a pop-up window.

Keep the System Idle Process running, even if it's huge. This process shows the percentage of CPU cycles that are not in use, so in this case, the bigger, the better.

Once you've found the processor glutton, get rid of that program. If it's something you can't do without, determine whether an updated version with a bug fix is available, or look for a competing program that does a better job.

Also, use a nifty program like Mike lin's startup editor: http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml

stops programs from autoloading that you don't want to waste CPU cycles.

For those of you with issues where you get 100% cpu usage on startup for a couple of minutes, the culprit is most likely windows updates. Disable that (use manual only) and your boot-ups will be much, much faster.

Type msconfig into the run box, go to start up and disable everything, reboot... If it doesn't happen repeat and enable one item at a time...

leave your system ALONE until you have reason to indite (ie blame) a process.

use your Task Manager-> Process Tab
click on the Column Heading CPU Twice

the processes that use the most cpu will always be at the top of the list.
System Idle Process should be on top, but if you've really got a bugger in the wood pile, it may not be.

Watch for several seconds and you will get a list of suspects to investigate

No offense "Jobeard" but how can you say "leave your system alone until he has a reason to suspect some app is at offense?" If I read the post correct everything was fine til a day or so ago... There is nothing wrong to go into msconfig and disable all and boot up. You can do this and do a elimination one by one til the culprit pops up... You are in NO way harming Windows or you OS in anyway.....
In fact when running XP, the only start up that will show after a clean install is CTFMON..... After that it is all user installed... So how can that screw things up???

msconfig has the power to really mess you up if you start disabling services and startups manually.

the right way to use it is the /SAFEBOOT switch on the Boot.ini tab;
leave everything else alone.

when you've fix the problem, you can revert to Normal Mode and all your startups and
services will be as they were before you started having problems or fussing with msconfig.

Ok, once again I will ask you... How does it mess you up??? be specific- Oh, I guess you can't because you don't know.

goodness me.

specifically, you can disable a service or startup you need or want and forget that
msconfig has disabled it.

please, I have no need to fuss with you -- it's all depends on what you want to do.

I guess 'wanna be geek' has very deep implications ...

Advanced Task Manager is better to use and you can monitor what's going on..

You cannot break anything by unchecking all of the startup tasks in Msconfig, but Msconfig should not be used to disable services. To do this run: "services.msc".

It is far better to check out the tasks you are actually disabling first of course, by goodling them and it is also wise to check the cpu/memory usage of running tasks by doing:

tasklist /svc

from the terminal.

This will show you everything including the processes running under svchost.

@tipstir: That looks like a good program.

Sometimes firefox robs 90% of my CPU & uses 180mb of ram with a few tabs open. im guessing thats not normal? I have 1 addon, & is called foxclocks. ny suggestions or advice on whether FF is ating normally is appreciated

I believe that Firefox preloads all webpages that your current tabs have links to. This is to allow you to navigate to these pages faster. But sometimes that function uses a lot of memory.