CPU usage keeps shooting up to 100% for no reason?

actually what you should do is hit the old standby ctrl-alt-del and open up task manager once there go to performance and in the lower right of the performance tab you will see a button that says resource monitor hit that and then go to the CPU tab my bet is that you will see the highest usage of your CPU (mine was pretty consistent at 80%) is deferred procedure calls and system interrupts. what is happening is instructions are flying around inside your system and they start to pile up, when they do they time-out and then more and more time-out and you end up with a traffic jam of sorts this chews up your processor to the point where it ends up doing nothing else, i have a quad core and all 4 were overloaded. SO i tried restoring, then repairing, then actually reinstalling windows 7, when that didn't work i figured it might be OS related so then i spent 3 hours on the phone with Microsoft tech support with them remotely logged into my machine (that gave me the creeps, let me tell ya) so while he was shutting things down and restarting and generally doing very little effective to my machine i was searching the INTERNET on another comp and after reading several posts and blogs in a variety of websites i determined it was a hardware issue, what exactly i never determined but my bet is you have a very unhappy piece of hardware inside your case and until its happy you are screwed. my suggestion is take it all apart and clean everything of all dust, cat hair or whatever has gotten stuck inside your case, redo the thermal paste for your processor, clean all connections for cards and ram (with an eraser on the contacts) make sure your ram has proper cooling or heat spreaders and generally make sure everything is back to the way it was when you first bought or built it. and that should clear up any deferred procedure calls and system interrupt problems you have. Unfortunately if this is not the issue i cant help you but I'm pretty sure this is the problem.

darkizzle said:

My PC has the habit of randomly and suddenly using up CPU to 100% for no apparent reason. My computer slows down to a crawl and I can't even shut down as it stays on the "shutting down..." screen. There's no rhyme or reason to it, though it never happens if I don't have the pc on for at least an hour or two. I checked the processes and there's nothing out of the ordinary running. I don't even know where to look. Help? This never happened when I was on Vista...

Its very difficult to diagnose, problems like yours over the net, but there are some basic starting points:

Do a through virus scan.
Check that your total memory is recognized by the computer
Check the event viewer for possible problems
Check the performance monitor
Try running the computer without the A/V

Boot up and check the available memory
When you begin to slow check the available memory again. If it is much less we know that there is a memory leak and we have to find it.

Type memory in the seach, by start button, and use the memory diagnostic.

You do have a problem. Do these tests then get back to us. Maybe not me, but someone will know and give you and answer.

for cleaning your case out use canned air or a vacumm...be very careful with them as you can damage an ic board if you bump something...but more than likely it will be your processor overheating...ram overheating or something not seated correctly in a pcie or pci slot...but your best bet is canned air....this is a little old but it gives a pretty good explanation of how to do the thermal paste How To Correctly Apply Thermal Grease | Hardware Secrets