[lilbabydino]

Hi. I recently got this new laptop and everything was working fine. Installed and played games, applications, no problem. However, this week, it has started randomly spiking to very high CPU (often going to 100% CPU with very few programs running).

I tried searching and the only suggestions I could find were to check for the process hogging all the CPU. However this is where I have the problem; the process list has programs which are at 5%~ CPU and then suddenly dart up to 40-50%, then back down again. Granted they are generally the same programs, but it seems strange that more than one program would constantly fluctuate its CPU usage, causing the games I used to play fine to become stuttery and unplayable. I have seen explorer.exe jump up and down, AVG8 and firefox, as well as even task manager itself!

Taking some advice from another thread, I tried starting my laptop in safe mode and this seemed to help; I could open firefox for example without going above 10% CPU. I'm not sure what this means however.

Suspecting malware, I also scanned with Spybot and removed 2 cookies, but I doubt this is the cause - removing them had no effect, anyway.

This problem may also be related to the time it takes my computer to boot up - even with 4 gigs of RAM, it still boots slower than my dad's laptop which has 1 gig of RAM and the same version of vista. My slow bootup time I can live with as long as my computer becomes relatively stable once it is finally usable!

Thanks for your help
Joe

(PS: My full laptop specs are in my profile, but if I've missed anything, please feel free to ask)

[JohnAlpha]

Originally Posted by lilbabydino

Taking some advice from another thread, I tried starting my laptop in safe mode and this seemed to help; I could open firefox for example without going above 10% CPU. I'm not sure what this means however.

When you boot in Safe Mode, it limits the services and startup programs to the bare minimum. If you could run in Safe Mode without any issues then something starting up may be causing the problem.

You can check what applications are starting up by going to Start > Run and entering:

msconfig

The Startup tab should list the applications you have coming up at boot. You can do the same for services by entering the following at Start > Run:

services.msc

Again you can try disabling ones that aren't critical to see if you get any better results.