100% cpu usage in windows - hardware related?

5tephen · 8 May 2006 at 18:58

I am going round to a neighbour's later this evening an he is having problems with Windows sitting at 100% load right from startup. I got to look at it a while back but for only 30 minutes. I am nearly certain it's hardware related because the thing has been formatted 3 times and the problem still exists.
And it's not the System Idle Process because the machine is really, reeeeally slow, much slower than it was a few months ago.
Are there any bios settings I should look out for? It's a Gigabyte K8NXP-9 (nForce 4) with AMD64 3500+, 1Gb RAM, 2x160Gb drives in onboard RAID 0. Suggestions would be appreciated greatly.

lee87 · 8 May 2006 at 19:14

I doubt it's a hardware problem, he probably keeps downloading something or a program has a bug making it run at 100% load.
Check the task manager to see what it is.

stigggeh · 8 May 2006 at 19:21

google the process that is using 100%, thats what i have done in the past and it usually works

once you know what it is you can fix it

5tephen · 8 May 2006 at 20:05

I'm just thinking, it could be the onboard SiliconImage RAID controller. It's not used afaik so I will try disabling that in the bios - I formatted the machine and it was fine for a good few hours until I got round to installing the drivers for this. But if I stop windows seeing it altogether, hopefully that will fix it.
Re: task manager - I'm hoping it'll be something obvious rather than svchost.exe or something like that

earlyflash · 9 May 2006 at 13:23

If it is a generic process, use Process Explorer from sysinternals.com to determine it's command line and/or service name assosciated with it.