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View Full Version : Strange CPU behaviour.


Sword
06-15-2006, 12:26 PM
I allways seem to have the oddest PC problems...

In December last year I bought a new comp through Dell (yes,yes, stop screaming :p)

here's the specs

XPS 600 (D12XP5)
Intel® Pentium® 4 Prosessor 640 with HT (3.20GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2MB cache)
Microsoft Operativ System Windows® XP Home Edition, SP2
2048MB Dual Channel DDR2 533MHz (2x1024MB)
Dual 256MB PCI-Express nVidia GeForce 6800 graphics cards
160GB (7200rpm) SATA Harddisk 8MB DataBurst™ cache
16x max. DVD+/-RW (Dual Layer) Drive
Sound Blaster Audigy™ 2 ZS, PCI Dolby Digital, 7.1 Speaker Support

So, most of the time I have no problems but it seems to have a problem relaxing so to speak. This usually happens after I've played CoH/V (This might also be happening when I've played other games. But I mostly just play CoV atm). I go out of the game and everything is fine for a little while, then the machine seems to lag. It's so extreme that the mouse pointer is moving choppy and loading up web pages takes as long as on a modem.
What it looks like is happening is that one of the two CPUs start working at max capacity, but without actually DOING anything.

I took some screenshots to demonstrate:

This is how things look when the machine is just ideling:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v323/Berzerkir/CPUIdleNormal.jpg

This is what it looks like when I'm running CoV:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v323/Berzerkir/CPURunningCoV.jpg

And this is what happens a little while after I've logged out of CoV:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v323/Berzerkir/CPUIdleStrange.jpg


Notice the "Processes" tab on the last picture. The last line shows 99% of CPU usage is going to "System Idle Process".
Another weird part of this is that if I start up a game, for example CoV or just the World of Warcraft login screen the CPU goes back to acting normaly. I can then Alt-TAB back to Windows and brows forums without any problems for a while. If the CPU starts acting up again I can just Alt-Tab into the game for a few secs and things will clear up again.

Well, if you don't have any suggestions to make I hope I atleast gave you a bit of entertainment :D

ThunderMace
06-15-2006, 02:49 PM
spyware that is maybe suppressed when you make the focus a non-windows exe perhaps?
I take it you've run spyware and virus scans, right?

Sword
06-15-2006, 03:47 PM
Yeah, I've run Spybot and Norton. I also tried uninstalling Norton just to see if that was causing the problems.