System hangs on 100% cpu core usage

Hello all,

Ever since I installed Windows 7 on my machine I'm having a problem.
(I previously had Vista on this machine without this problem.)

Sometimes the system slowly starts to hang. At first, the active applications no longer respond (like games stop producing sound/drawing graphics) and then after a few seconds the mouse/keyboard also freeze up, eventually leading to total system failure.

The problem is very random. Sometimes it happens 3 times a day and sometimes there's like 3 weeks without any problems at all. It took me some time to find a pattern (especially since the Event Viewer doesn't list anything at the time of freezing), but I think I have finally found one.

I am currently closely monitoring CPU/RAM usage on my Logitech G15 keyboard (which has a program that shows the real time stats on the display). For the last few freezes I noticed that the CPU usage of the 3rd core of my quad core processor was 100% , while the rest was somewhere between 25-50%. It seems that whenever the 3rd core hits 100%, the system stops responding.

I have a AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition CPU on a Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P motherboard.

Does anybody have any clue if my diagnosis makes any sense and if it's a problem that can be dealt with? Luckily I save my work a lot, but I'd like to work without freeze-ups whenever possible

If you're monitoring cpu usage, then at 75 percent why don't you right click on the taskbar to "Start Task Manager." When it comes up, open the "Processes" tab. Click on CPU to see what is using the most CPU. That will tell you what is using up your processor. Take whatever action necessary, either uninstall that program or stop that process before the computer freezes entirely.

Ambimom said:

If you're monitoring cpu usage, then at 75 percent why don't you right click on the taskbar to "Start Task Manager." When it comes up, open the "Processes" tab. Click on CPU to see what is using the most CPU. That will tell you what is using up your processor. Take whatever action necessary, either uninstall that program or stop that process before the computer freezes entirely.

Click to expand...

It's not so much a single process I guess, since it's always the same core that causes the freeze. Unless there is a program that is married with that core, I think it's unlikely to find anything in the task manager that would explain the freeze?

If you don't look, you definitely won't find anything!