Troubleshooting my crashing system

PyRo88 · 11 Oct 2006 at 17:43

Hi, I've been having a strange problem with my system for a while now but I'm not sure if it's hardware or software related.

About 3/4 times a day (If I'm here all day) a random process, though usually firefox, will begin to consume 100% of the CPU. At this point the system is responsive enough to bring up Task Manager to see what's going on. Some other programs will be unresponsive at this point too. I can do two things here:

1. Killing the process resolves the problem, until I try to do something related to explorer.exe - like hovering over the taskbar. At this point the whole system becomes unresponsive and I have to use the reset button to get back in.

2. Setting the process priority to low allows me to continue working, with offending process still taking all the CPU it can get.

95% of the time it's Firefox taking the CPU - maybe because I've always got it open. I've tried not running Firefox for a day, but instead iTunes did the same thing.

System:
Athlon XP 2500, was overclocked, not anymore to try and resolve problem, temps fine
1GB RAM

Any clues would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
-Chris

J.B · 11 Oct 2006 at 18:19

could be a problem in your ram somewhere,if you have 2 sticks try just using one.

bledd · 11 Oct 2006 at 23:30

what av and antispyware programs are you using?

PyRo88 · 12 Oct 2006 at 10:20

bledd. said:
what av and antispyware programs are you using?

AVG anti virus and SpyBot S&D anti spyware - no problems found with those.

J.B said:
could be a problem in your ram somewhere,if you have 2 sticks try just using one.

I'll give memtest86 a run when I go out later.

-Chris

PyRo88 · 12 Oct 2006 at 19:53

I ran memtest86 for just over two hours, then ran Prime95 blend test for just over three hours. Everything passed fine, yet within an hour of resuming normal activity firefox stole the CPU again.

Any more ideas?

-Chris

PyRo88 · 14 Oct 2006 at 22:06

Might aswell try a bump, hopefully some other people will see this and be able to suggest something.

-Chris

bledd · 15 Oct 2006 at 00:13

hijackthis

^google for that and run it, paste the logfile into hijackthis.de website, incase there's some nasties on there..

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if nothings working, a format might be worth a try

do it on a spare hard drive if you have one, just incase it is a hardware problem.. (so you can do more troubleshooting if a new install doesn't fix it)