[aka Brett]

Originally Posted by NiceGuy87

There is nothing. Only system idle process, which is at 99 and I know that's good.

99 for system idle is good
that means you have nothing eating up you cpu cycles

[NiceGuy87]

Ok so my brother scraped up enough money to get a 1GB stick of RAM and that didn't fix it. He then bought another CPU - the exact same one and that didn't fix the problem.

I believe I forgot to mention his computer is fine in safe mode, but then again you can't tell for sure because flash is disabled in safe mode so maybe it would freeze and maybe it wouldn't. Who knows?

He says it hasn't frozen yet, but his CPU still spikes constantly. Is this hardware or software? What is going on?

[aka Brett]

Originally Posted by brett888

Alot of things can cause a cpu to eat up the cycles
Have you tried booting into safe mode and see how it runs?

[NiceGuy87]

I said it still spikes in safe mode, just not to the point of freezing. He's only running 1 GB of RAM at 400mhz so I figure maybe that's still the problem. I told him to throw his other 512 stick in there to run 1.5, but he said the last time he tried it his computer wouldn't boot up. I told him sometimes you need to put the cards in every other stick (color coordinated). So he'll try that and also I told him to check out his virtual memory in case there's an issue there.

[aka Brett]

even lack of ram wont caused excessive cpu usage.
When it spikes up to 100 are you able to see in task mgr which process is the offender.
I am more apt to think this is a software issue rather than a hardware issue..due to the lack of receiving any errors