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SUDDEN SYSTEM SLOWDOWN(win XP sp3)


ganesh61

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Hi,

I am new to this forum. I am not a Techie. I saw MAGIC ANDRE's Dec 2009 response to 'How to get the cause of high CPU usage by DPC / Interrupt'. I think he can help me to get rid off this maddening experience of my system slow down. It logs in with in 70secs and maintains a very decent speed in its operations. But during the course of an application or even when it is idle the CPU usage climbs to 100% and the sys starts crawling. becomes dead slow that makes you go mad. Media files cannot be played, if you try you get outlandish noise from the speakers and never recovers till you restart the sys.

I am not able to identify the process which evokes such reponse from the system becz it may happen at any time. It may not happen at all on a given day. Now I have been working with it for the last 40mts with out this nusense but after restarting it for four times prior to that in an hour of work.

I have tried everything, through scanning by antivirus, malware, etc system is clean. I have registry cleaner(uniblue) and system speedup(amigo) tools with no help.

Process explorer indicates an idle process of 90%(when no application is running) when the system is alright but in the slow down state idle process is either 00 or upto 10%. However 'hardware interrupt' in PE jumps to even 50% once the system slows down. When the system is normal it would be < 1.5%

the specifc of my system:

Processor: Pen 4, 2.26gh

Hard disk : 2 nos. 80Gb and 160 Gb with operating system in system-partition of one of these disks. there a 6 partitions.

RAM: 1 GB DDR1

OS: Windows XP SP 3

I have formatted all the disks since i started getting this problem with out any result.

I know vry little abt computers, but i have taken this as a challange. Every day I am spending a lot of time visiting a lot of web sites and trying every possible trick to set this right. When the machine behaves you love to work with it.

Would appreciate help from any member of this forum.

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hi Magic Andre,

I tried my best to install xperf in my system but couldnot. It seems xperf works only on vista, and win7. I down loaded wpt.x86 and installed it. I am not sure about how t use those tools I see there. It will be great if you can help me in getting xperf right. From this forum and various other forums I understand it is a great tool. Please help me.

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Hi Magic Andre,

Thanks for the great suggestion. Being a non-techi it was tough for me to follow certain things, but somehow wriggled out these .etl files. I ran the command on two occassions that is when the system is normal and when it is in slows down state. Though I could not read too much out of it, I fig out that the slow down is caused by some software or driver. That, I am confident you will be able to make out. Your Universal Extracter is a great idea.

Unfortunately while uploading I find my upload is restircted to 500K. whereas the two tiles add upto nearly 7MB. Is there any other way I can post it to your attention?

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Hi Andre,

Tnks a ton for all these help. I have been trying to understand what this ACPI? and came across a lot of disucssion in various forums on how it causes massive cpu usage. The AIDA Extreme software reveals that the temp of:

CPU: 33 D.celsius

Mohter Board: 38

HDD1: 43 (OS)

HDD2: 41

I reckon that this is around the idel temp of these devices

One more thing that fogot to mention initially that in the slowdown state my system does not shut down but will freeze at "windows is shutting down" usually i force it to shut.

Rightnow I am typing this messag when my maching is taking one second for every word typed. this is sickenin

Any way ahead?

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ACPI = Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) is a specification which provides an open standard for device configuration and power management by the operating system.

XP doesn't support the tracing options of Vista/7 so I can't see which ACPI function causes it. But everything was causing a higher CPU usage so it may be that your CPU dies. The 2.26GHz P4 is very old.

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hi Andre,

In the Threads tab of Process Explorer(Got it by right clicking the item 'system' in PE list) I suspended ACPI. Though CPU usage climbed down and was hovering around 30 from 100, the speed of the system did not improve. Importantly playing audio file was still not possible. There was a marginal improvement in the system speed but was not remarkable.

I also tried diabling the ACPI in BIOS, the system did not boot.

Should I change the processer, along with it everything else has to be changed. Is not It?

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I also tried diabling the ACPI in BIOS, the system did not boot.

That is to be expected. Windows XP was installed on your computer using the ACPI HAL, and that setting in the BIOS effectively changes your HAL. XP doesn't like when you change the HAL, as you have seen.

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I gotten word that a throttling processor can cause the OS to report high CPU usage percentage.

(When it self-underclocks because of reaching close to 90 C)

The heatsink may not even be all the way on the chip.

(more common with the darn 775 push-pin heatsinks than with a 478) Or a lot of dust.

Edited by RJARRRPCGP
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