CPU using 100% everytime I boot up

[Jeromy Darling]

I came home from work the other day, and I don???t know if there was some sort of power outage, but my microwave clock was off, and my computer had restarted itself and was waiting at the log on screen (really creepy). Anyway, when I logged on, it was really really slow. I did a ctrl-alt-delete and checked the CPU usage ??? it was maxed out at 100%!!! I checked all the processes running, and nothing was out of the ordinary ??? I even closed down some processes, nothing helped. I restarted ??? same thing. I???m completely baffled. It's a brand new Dell 4550, 512 MB, 80 gig hard drive, it's been perfect. But I'm completely stumped. No network connections. Haven't done a virus scan yet or ran "Ad-Aware", but I'm worried it's something deeper. It's like someone came into my house and messed with the thing.

[Jon Finley]

Well...... Time to get a UPS and add the auto-shutdown feature.

Also.. look at running CHKDSK /F (scandisk) at your next reboot. You could have file system damage causing the load on the CPU.

Jon

[Khalid A. Al-Tayaran]

Hi,

Go to task manager and check what is taking 100% cpu time.

[David Holbrook]

It is not unusual to find explorer is eating 100% of the CPU, or disk scanning after an unexpected shutdown.

Use CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up the menu and select taskmanager. It will let you see what application is using the CPU so much if you sort it by CPU use. I would also bring it up in safe mode and run scandisk to see if there is any drive damage. After that, bring it up check taskmanager again.

With an 80 GB drive, the system may be trying to run arepair on the drive because of the powerfailure (The old: the last shutdown was unexpected error message!), and a drive of this size can take forever (hours) to finish and will use 100 of the CPU to do the job.

This is one of the main reasons to not have the entire drive as a single partition including the OS area!

Good luck,

David

[Richard Darling]

Jeromy,
I believe that David is correct. Just put the computer on and leave it alone for the night, and see if the problem is corrected in the AM.
Richard