Windows 7: CPU spike

Alright so I was googling my problem, to see if any similar things have happened to other people and I came across a thread on this site, however it was dead and the problem was not resolved so I guess I'll have to ask myself.

I have windows 7 HP computer (Horrible I know)



Anyway, it's not a fabulous laptop, it's good enough to run WoW at 30FPS, however I found out that I had a virus so we decided, hey the laptop is due for a format, haven't done that since I bought it, so I got an external hard drive and formatted it. It took us 4 days to get it back up and running because for some reason when we formatted it, it just wasn't accepting anything. Anyway that's not totally important.

The main issue I'm having is that, even when my computer was virus infested, I still had the ability to game with ease, but now my CPU spikes up randomly, EVEN when nothing is open, my boyfriend has checked for me, it's nothing running in the background. It just spikes up....... So now for example when I open WoW it will run anywhere from 30-60 FPS at first and the CPU will spike up and bring it down to 1FPS. It sometimes happens when I'm trying to watch a movie, or even simply on google or hell even my desktop screen.

Another point, my computer isn't heating up. It's not hot or anything, and the fan isn't overworking either.

Any tips? I'd love to not have to spend money on a new laptop right now, so anything would be awesome.

Have a look in Event Viewer whether there are any critical problems. Then tell us what they are.

Also run this program and tell us what is says - are there any red spikes. DPC Latency Checker

This is what I found on event viewer...







I checked with my boyfriend on the latency thing, he said he checked it already and there was nothing out of the ordinary.

I would run a Repair Install

Yeah..that's basically what got us in this mess, completely formatted it, and then re installed everything from scratch. =/

A Repair install only corrects faulty parts of the OS. It is not like a reinstall. It is like a higher level sfc /scannow.

I had the same problem with an Acer I was renting, aspire 5253 bz-893 I think. When I installed Sp1 the cpu would work harder even though I had turned most unused services off. I never could use SP1, but now those days are over and I have a good Lenovo Thinkpad. I can use SP1 with no problems, I was told that Sp1 can cause problems with some computer models. But I never messed with it I just did'nt use sp1 with the acer and it worked ok, not as good as Lenovo though.