Blarrgh, within 10 seconds of booting up cpu usage cycling between 30-100%

[Nuts]

I can't seem to find the culprit but I know I definetly should not be experiencing this under a 1.4ghz system with the things I have running during startup. Can anyone help me? It's totally killing explorer, whatever it is, like trying to run XP on a 300mhz system with 64megs ram, not a 1.4ghz system with 512megs ram.

 

[gothic]

Can you give us a clue as to what applications / tools you have running at startup or automatically, like antivirus, firewalls etc. please

TOK

 

[Nuts]

I'd like to take a screen shot of the task manager, but I'm not entirely certain how to go about doing that in xp, I know that in old windows you could simply do a printscreen and paste the result into mspaint, but xp doesn't have mspaint so I'm not sure how to do this.

 

[firehawk]

It works the same way in XP. Paint is under accessories.

 

[Nuts]

one thing I just noticed is that the biggest spikes, ie up to 100% usage are coming when I initially open a webpage or microsoft outlook. When I do either of these actions the usage spikes to 100% for a short time, then goes back to alternating between 0 and 30% usage with a bare minimum of things running. (I did get rid of some spyware/ hack program that had installed itself on me computer and that god rid of some of the slowdowns)

ok it also seems to be involved with anythign that actively access the network/internet. ie., incoming im messages, even w/in the same window cause the spike, as do sending said im messages, ie, each message w/in one window.

 

[andre9540]

you might have proccesor schelduling set wrong

 

[Nuts]

Originally posted by firehawk
It works the same way in XP. Paint is under accessories.

not under mine, I installed the plus pack awhile back and now all that stuff is gone for some reason
whats the name of the mspaint .exe file so I can search for it?

 

[Nuts]

Originally posted by andre9540
you might have proccesor schelduling set wrong

yeah the thing is this just started happening recently, like yesterday and I haven't had this particular problem in the past several monthes of running xp. I tried going back to a system restore point in case something had been installed w/o my knowledge or some shit but that doesn't appear to help

 

[GoNz0]

mspaint.exe in system32

 

[Nuts]

don't appear to have mspaint.exe anywhere on my system

 

[Nuts]

well when I open something like outlook or ie, vsmon is responsible for the 100% cpu utilization

 

[Deszaras]

That would be Zone Alarm firewall.

 

[Nuts]

yeah checked that out, but again, it never bleedin well used to do that, and my system still fancies cycling erratically through cpu usages.