High and erratic CPU usage

[RogerR]

I've been getting erratically crappy performance for a while now - slow UI, hanging programs and eventually a hanging OS that won't shut down.

It often hangs when I'm using email (Eudora7), but I think that's a red herring because even when I'm not, CPU usage often spikes into the 80% range under very little load and for no apparent reason. Just opening a folder causes a spike to 70+%.

The crash is not simply on account of CPU going to 100% either, the UI will stall for a few seconds at a time with low CPU / RAM utilization, but it seems to progress until explorer hangs. It doesn't seem to be a heat issue - everything is clean and dust free - and that wouldn't explain the cpu spikes anyway.

Nothing really pops out under Resource Monitor and I ran sfc /scannow a couple of times - no integrity faults detected.

Any ideas on how to trace this?

 

[zigzag3143]

I've been getting erratically crappy performance for a while now - slow UI, hanging programs and eventually a hanging OS that won't shut down.

It often hangs when I'm using email (Eudora7), but I think that's a red herring because even when I'm not, CPU usage often spikes into the 80% range under very little load and for no apparent reason. Just opening a folder causes a spike to 70+%.

The crash is not simply on account of CPU going to 100% either, the UI will stall for a few seconds at a time with low CPU / RAM utilization, but it seems to progress until explorer hangs. It doesn't seem to be a heat issue - everything is clean and dust free - and that wouldn't explain the cpu spikes anyway.

Nothing really pops out under Resource Monitor and I ran sfc /scannow a couple of times - no integrity faults detected.

Any ideas on how to trace this?

There are a couple of thigns that can spike that. SVCHOST, and AUDIODG come to mind but to find out which you should start in event viewer.

There are several ways to find what the problem is. The best is to go into event viewer (type eventvwr in search). Go to the windows log>application tab.

You want to look for critical errors (they have red in the left column ).

When you find them you want to look for critical errors that say app hang, app crash, or anything that relates to the problem.

When you find them please note the event ID, and the source codes and tell us what they are.

Let us know if you need help with any of this.

Ken

 

[RogerR]

Thanks, Ken.

You want to look for critical errors (they have red in the left column ).

When you find them you want to look for critical errors that say app hang, app crash, or anything that relates to the problem.

There are a few;
App hang: Eudora Event ID 1002
LoadPerf ID 3012 DWord corruption
App Error; Eudora ID 1000 faulting module MFC71.DLL
App Hang; Explorer.exe ID 1002