[ganesh61]

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.

[MagicAndre1981]

copy xperf folder to XP and run a 30s trace. Zip and upload the file so that I can help you.

[nitroshift]

I'm placing my bet on overheating.

[ganesh61]

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.

[MagicAndre1981]

Use Universal Extractor to extract the 32Bit xperf MSI and copy the extracted folder to XP and run the command in my DPC guide. Zip the generated ETL and upload it.

[ganesh61]

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?

[dencorso]

Yes! Upload to megaupload, uploaded.to, qshare.com, or any other such file repository, and post the download link for your file it'll give you.

[ganesh61]

Yes, Thanks! I shall do that

[ganesh61]

Hi Magic Andre,

These are the links of 3 files with Mega upload:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=457WN2ME
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=RY79MLHI
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=UU9YJ8EH

[MagicAndre1981]

the ACPI.sys causes the CPU usage and this may be caused by an overheating CPU. Have you checked this? What is the temperature of the CPU?

It may also be an issue with the PSU. My laptop PSU was damaged and I also had such slowness issues. So check this 2 things.

[ganesh61]

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?

[MagicAndre1981]

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.

[ganesh61]

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?

[Tripredacus]

ganesh61, on 23 November 2011 - 02:16 AM, said:

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.

[RJARRRPCGP]

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.

This post has been edited by RJARRRPCGP: 24 November 2011 - 01:32 PM

[ganesh61]

Hi RJARRRPCGP,

I am not sure about how I can use this to approach my problem. You sound very technical. Can you please explain.

[RJARRRPCGP]

ganesh61, on 25 November 2011 - 07:55 AM, said:

Hi RJARRRPCGP,

I am not sure about how I can use this to approach my problem. You sound very technical. Can you please explain.

Intel processors, at least since Pentium 4, self-underclock if the temp is measured to be past roughly 85 C on the processor.

[MagicAndre1981]

he posted that his CPU is cool:

Quote

CPU: 33 D.celsius

[ganesh61]

Hi Andre,

This is almost one year since I reported the system freeze/slowdown and subsequently with your help figured it out as ACPI issue. You suggested "your processor P4 must have gotten slow" & suggested changing the Processor could be a solution. I tried another P4 with out desired results. Then the thought about ACPI drivers stuck me. Through the device manager I changed the ACPI driver from 'ACPI uni Processor PC' to 'ACPI Standard PC'. to my surprise the pc behaves like gem. It is very fast now and boots in 25 secs. It is now almost one month without the problem.

The only change i noticed is while shutting down as it used to be some years back the PC comes to the screen "now it is safe to switch off your computer" instead of shutting down completely. I have to power off.

I belive this could be an useful tip to others as well.

Thanks for helping to trace the problem.

[MagicAndre1981]

ok, thanks for the feedback.