System process 99% EVEN in safe mode

[WestPAGiz]

I have a computer where the system process is 99%. I have reformatted the hard drive and re-isntalled windows xp twice and still the same problem. I did a full diagonsitic on the hard drive and it passed. There was a power outage that may have caused this. I was just wondering if anyone knew if a bad cpu would cause this problem? or maybe motherboard? or maybe powersupply?

 

[NickCat11]

West,

What are the specs on the computer? Processor speed, amount of RAM, etc... This is info that we could use to help solve your problem.

Nick

 

[WestPAGiz]

Well, I had another hard drive and installed it and reloaded windows and the problem disappeared. The only difference is this drive is not SATA and windows was not loaded from the compaq recovery partition. I have created compaq recovery disks and going to use them on the ide drive and see what happens. It is a compaq 3500+ 64 AMD processor with 1gb RAM and the drive that was in there was 200gb SAT Western Digital

Thanks
Shawn

 

[Ed2020]

Shawn,

You need to see what the System process is actually doing in order to determine the cause of this problem.

Two utilities I'd recommend to start off with would be Process Explorer and Process Monitor from

http://www.sysinternals.com

(both freeware). A report from Process Monitor would give us a lot more to work with. My guess is this isn't a hardware related problem...

Ed Metcalfe.



Please do not feed the trolls.....

 

[smah]

What specific system process are you actually talking about? You can sort task manager's process list by clicking the CPU column heading.

 

[WestPAGiz]

I've just reloaded windows on the orginal drive with the restore disks I made. It takes about 2 hours to boot. The system process I was talking about is the Image named SYSTEM. Hopefully in the next several hours I can run the 'process explorer' and 'process monitor'

 

[WestPAGiz]

okay I got those process monitoring tools to run and it is the USB drivers that are out of control. In fact, the usb ports don't even recognize a device when I plug one in, but everything appears okay in the system device manager. I will dig a little deeper.

Thanks everyone for all your input

 

[WestPAGiz]

After narrowing down the driver USBport.sys, I did a google search and found someone with the exact same problem

http://forums.techguy.org/windows-nt-2000-xp/413839-solved-17-cpu-utilization-normal.html

They disabled the USB 2 support to fix it.