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#1
How do I diagnose this performance problem?
My wife has a Dell Inspiron 1570 (2GB RAM), relatively empty HDD, onboard graphics.
For a significant time she has been hitting 100% CPU making her machine unusable. Neither the task manager or Resource Monitor show what is eating the CPU time.
She contacted Dell whilst under warranty, they 'scanned' the system and claimed not be able to find any problems. All drivers are up to date. The system is running only Microsoft Security Essentials for anti-virus. I have used Revo-Uninstaller to minimise the amount of software on the machine. I have used CCleaner to clear out the rubbish.
Whilst researching the problem I came across a similar problem someone had reported and it was cured by unplugging the machine from the mains. I tried that and it worked! After unplugging the power supply, the CPU usage gradually drops to normal levels. I bought a new power supply but this has not cured the problem.
What usually causes the CPU to hit 100% is streaming video or downloading large files. That said, there could be other causes that we haven't hit on yet.
I have downloaded sysinternal's process explorer and tried looking to see if I could figure something out with that but I do not have the required knowledge to use it I think.
Could anybody help me how to cure this or, at least, figure out the cause? I would be incredibly grateful.
thanks, dan