Dark Arrow on 26/4/2008 at 10:45
There is a rather strange problem with my laptop. Every now and then, when I'm watching movies on youtube, or doing something else on the laptop, I lose all processor power. The computer isn't in heavy use as far as I know.
I have checked taskmanager, but the processes use about 50% of the capacity of the processor. However, the computer reports that the processor is 100% in use. :confused:
Has anyone else run into similar problems with Windows Vista? Does anyone know what might be causing this? F-Secure doesn't report a virus infection.
Zerker on 26/4/2008 at 21:24
If you have a dual core laptop, using 100% of one core will show up as 50% of the overall CPU usage. Of course, what SHOULD be happening is any other programs should be using the other core. What does task manager say is eating up the 50% usage, anyhow? It shouldn't stay that way...
Dark Arrow on 29/4/2008 at 17:34
Task manager tells me that I'm using 100% of the processing power, but none of the processes use that much of the processor. It is like there is a process somewhere that isn't showing up on task manager as the numbers don't add up.
The problem becomes extremely annoying when I'm watching videos or encoding a video. The video/dvd I'm watching becomes shoppy or the encoding speed drops to 1 or 0 fps.
Could this be sign of a hardware failure, a virus, or a malfuctioning program?
The computer is a laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium. Has anyone experienced anything similar?
Mortal Monkey on 30/4/2008 at 06:08
Services don't show up on the task manager. It's a common trick for viruses to register themselves as services.
Dark Arrow on 30/4/2008 at 06:15
I disabled Vista's indexing service. I'll have to see whether it helps.
I'll try the program as well. It looks promising.
Dark Arrow on 7/5/2008 at 13:23
Looks like my laptop is going to be dead soon. I tried updating Windows Vista to SP1, but it failed due to an error. When I ran memory diagnostics (or whatever it is in english), the laptop shut down. After that it wouldn't load windows until I unplugged everything from it. I even tried my recovery dvds but those gave me an error message when it was checking my hardware configuration. I have backed up everything important, but it seems that this laptop is going to be dead by tomorrow :(.
Now Im going to run scandisk.Then if it still works, I'm going to run memory diagnostics again and hope for the best. I don't know much about computers, but I'm betting the memory is faulty. Or could this be caused by a virus?
Mortal Monkey on 11/5/2008 at 09:53
It does sound like a hardware issue. Just testing your memory shouldn't cause your computer to reboot though, and wouldn't explain your CPU trouble. Perhaps your CPU or memory controller (motherboard) is faulty.
Did you run the memory test from the BIOS/bootdisk, or from within Windows?
bikerdude on 11/5/2008 at 10:42
also check your powersave settings in windows, you may find that even when its plugged in the laptop is lowering the speed of the cpu, even when viewing a movie.. the easiest way to fix/diagnose this is to set it to always on.
biker
Dark Arrow on 11/5/2008 at 12:40
Well my laptop has now been shipped to Germany to Acer repair center.
The computer repeatedly rebooted when I tested the memory. After that Windows Vista failed to load. The only way I could get windows to open after the problem began was to power the laptop with battery power only. After windows had recovered the problem was gone, until I retested the memory in which case the laptop wouldn't load windows.
I restored the system to factory default setting, but the memory test still failed.
So it seems there is something wrong in the hardware. The original problem and this problem might be related. Perhaps it was the memory that was causing both problems, or something had fried on the motherboard (it was running rather hot when encoding movies).
Anyway, thanks for your help. :thumb:
