Hang

[lameid]

I was dumbfounded this morning...

My media Center PC (Windows 7 Home, Dual Core 3.Ghz 4 GB DDR2) was slow and barely responsive... Taskmanager was showing 45-55% processor utilization... Didn't see anything big, hit show all users... several minutes later same high utiliztion show at the bottom and System Idle sitting at 97%.

Any thoughts on something this weird?

 

[goombawaho]

Use Process Explorer and tell us which, if any, process (the name) is using the 55% and how long it uses that much - continuously or just briefly.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[lameid]

At this point I have cold booted the computer... Like I said taskmanager processes did not list any process eating the CPU up... I found this really strange not to see anything there... It took several minutes to do something as basic as open task manager... So when it hung on shut down after several minutes it got the cold boot.

 

[lameid]

I was more curious about the process not being in task manager and any thoughts of what it might be.

AV is Eset Nod32... So I doubt it was the scanner.

 

[goombawaho]

If you'd follow my instructions, Process Explorer shows you more detail than Task Manager and may enlighten you/us.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[lameid]

That boat has sailed.

 

[rclarke250]

So what you are saying is, after a cold boot, it is working now, with none of the slowness from before, you didn't look at the process manager to see if it could shed some light on your issue, and now after the fact, you want someone to guess at what could be caused this issue, on a machine and configuration we have no knowledge of? Good Luck.

 

[lameid]

What I am saying is I looked at task manager that gave no indicator of what process was using anywhere near the indicated processor utilization.

I have never seen that before. I expect once I am looking at all user processes that 100% - System Idle process % = CPU utilization. I would have expected less than 5% using this logic but saw 45 - 55%. And I have no idea how that is possible and would like to understand how so I can find it. Sure I expect process manager to give more information like which thing is actually causing the problem under a svchost instance but not process use that taskmanager can't see.

 

[cdogg]

I understand where you're coming from, lameid. Although process manager shows more detail about each process, task manager should still show all tasks and their CPU utilization.

I suspect that performance was so bad that even task manager couldn't find enough resources to update properly, perhaps constantly showing a 2-second slice that wasn't in sync with the process that monitors CPU Utilization. Who knows? In any case, hopefully it was just a fluke.

-Carl
"The glass is neither half-full nor half-empty: it's twice as big as it needs to be."

[tab][navy]For this site's posting policies, click [/navy]here.

 

[lameid]

My issue with it being stale is that it took many seconds to re-draw taskmanager to show all users... so it doesn't make sense it was stale... I guess two separate things could be tracking and one hung.

Hopefully it is just a fluke of the wrong bits getting flipped randomly... I'd rather have the same improbable luck with the lottery if that's the case.

My worst fear is some sort of malware. But it doesn't surf the web much and has security software... So unless my entire lan is compromised... This is of course why I was hoping for some practical explanation.... In other news my Vista laptop has been crashing logon.scr when left sitting on the log on screen, hence suspicions... But that would be another thread and another forum... besides, Google finds things about that issue. Here's hoping it is a coincidence or at least the same cosmic ray :/

 

[lameid]

The issue seems to be repeating intermittently now. However process explorer does reveal is the interrupt service. Also 1 of my hard drives is intermittently disappearing from the bios. I'm just hoping I can get all the data off the drive before it goes belly up for good and removing it fixes the problem.

I had another drive bought and installed around the same time start throwing SMART errors maybe 2 months ago and got its files. This seems at the interface level and not platter/motor baSled on lack of smart errors.

If you're reading this for help and have new hardware then you should look to the upgrade the drivers first.