100% CPU usage & hardware interrupts.......3

[sambokiddo]

hey, i've browsed this site frot he last couple of days looking to remedy a problem that sounds very similar to the poster on the last two threads with this title. my acer 1640 laptop, purchased may 2006, has been since christmas struggling to carry out two processes at once, with the same music/dvd slowing characterists and long opening time for applications as for cozzy. process explorer has identified that at the moment my laptop has difficulty processing, hardware interrupts jumps to anything as high as 80%.

in attempts to solve this problem i've disbled everything that didn't seem completely necessary in device manager, used spybot and avast! to clean the system, and freed up a lot of memory (about 60% now free). i'm also up-to-date with windows autoupdates and any other updates that i regularly do.

i'm not especially clued-up on computers, so if it's a driver problem as with cozzy then any help would be very much appreciated!

[TT4Titans]

One thing about a brand name computers is they load it down with a lot of useless software.I always first thing is format and reinstall my own windows but I know most don't have there own copy.

One how much memory do you have?

Also go to Start - Run type in MSCONFIG and disable any thing you don't need running in the background.things like your virus detector and such you need.but quicktime,word and a few others you don't check this site for things your not sure of.

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/startups/

[sambokiddo]

i have 40 gig partitioned into two twenty's. i should've mentioned that i have been through msconfig as much as possible. and i did have some minor success this morning following the direction on this site http://frazzleddad.blogspot.com/2006/03/lousy-performance-high-hardware.html, and everything now seems fine with the exception of every song i play skipes for the first 5 seconds and then plays fine. application loading and start-up are now much, much faster and i can run multiple programs again. my process explorer is now registering a dramatic rise in "avast! antivirus service" cpu usage coinciding with slow playback. this is different to, and has replaced, the hardware interrupts cpu usage increases menitoned in the last post, and this has definitely never happend before.

thanks for the help

[sambokiddo]

ok, and by turning down the heuristic sensitivity of the active scanners on avast! it seems to be running well again now.

does this sound fixed? or do i need to leave my laptop on for a while to see if it reoccurs?

[dcc]

How much RAM do you have, and how much free space in there on the hdd's two partitions.

[sambokiddo]

7.60 and 10.2 GB free on each partition of hd, and 504MB of RAM

[dcc]

Your hdd is pretty full, out of the remaining free space the hdd will allocate a percentage of that for swap space. If you are running anything that is taxing the RAM it will revert to using the swap space of the hdd, in this case it's not available.

[temp00666]

I had 100% CPU usage due to mainly HW IRQ on an Acer laptop and the cause was found to be Automatic Updates. When the computer had "Microsoft Update" installed over just the normal "Windows Update" this problem occurred. I solved the problem by stopping the Automatic Update service in MMC (services.msc) and changing the startup option for the service to 'manual' - but the other possibility would be to switch back to regular Windows Update on the Windows Update website (provided that you can browse there & manipulate the site with such a slow system!) I can't be sure that this will be your solution but it is worth a try if you haven't figured it out yet.