Have a Dell laptop at work, 4 GB ram, XP, dual core cpu and recently its started at random intervals goint to 100 percent cpu usage on both cores, its been looked into extensively by me and the desktop guys.

No one process seems to hog the cpu, it does it for a while, then stops, it can happen when nothing running, I rebuilt it from the image today and it was still the same, its had process explorer and other sys tools on it, diagnostics, shutting down processes and services to no avail. I had the lid ajar to keep it cool, I had my dek fan blowing through it, the temps were between 39 and 43c so it wasnt heat, its still quite new so I dont think it was dust,

I pinched a Dell workstation, Xeon Quad core from stock and sent the Laptop away but interested to seek any other opinions, can CPU's just go bad, I would think they either work or dont ?

 

Index Service?

(clutch clutch)

 

Anti Virus?

 

I see things like this quite frequently and 99 times out of 100 it is down to my completely inept managed service provider doing something they shouldn't have.

But since you mention dell laptop, I would direct you to the power scheme in use. Is this set to Laptop / portable by any chance. Changing this to Always on will likely cure the problem. I have yet to understand why, but it just seems to work.

if that makes no difference it may be a combo of the indexing service running, and although this is a background process, the AV product you are running may be 'on access' scanning every file the indexing service touches.

It would be worth pulling the network cable from the box also and see if things calm down at all. It is not the first time I have seen a managed service provider deploy an SMS job in the middle of the day, or use MOM / SCOM to gather statistics during working hours.

can you tell yet that I hate managed services!!!!!