Win Xp home is clocking the CPU at 100% 2

[markvj]

Greetings! A buddy in orlando just called and loaded WIn XP Home on his P3 Dell with a large HDD and 128RAM.

He says that the machine logins in but whenever he clicks any desktop icon, the machine thrashes and goes to 100% CPU usage - task manager says explorer.exe is taking up 99%.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated....
Markvj
I am visiting family at murpete1@netzero.net

 

[nlm9802]

sounds like spyware or possibly something like seti running high priority maybe.
try booting in safe mode (f8 before the colorful windows loading screen), also download adaware and spybot search and destroy.
do the items eventually open? or does it stay 99-100% until turned off? how long is the delay if they do open?

 

[Dodger67]

I had a simillar issue with a Dell lap top. After a long time troubleshooting I ended up running one of those hardware test utilities (from a bootdisk). It ended up that the L2 Memory was going bad (that would put more of a load on the cpu if there was no L2).

I'm not saying your issue is that but if you try all the other stuff (virus, spy ware, etc) then you might want to look at hardware testing utilties.

Good Luck,

Dodger

 

[paparazi]

markvj
Guess he's gone from Windows 98? which is happy with as little as 64mb of Ram to XP that needs 256mb or above to run cleanly.
I suspect that because you friend only has 128mb of ram it is using the hard drive swop file almost straight away, this is because the PC is just running out of memory very quickly and having to use the hard drive as tempory memory storage(this slows the system down dramatically and increases CPU usage)
XP uses 128mb just to run, 256mb is just about adequate with around 100mb free on the average setup but with 384mb or above things just run much more sweetly.

Martin

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