XP SP3 high CPU usage

Steve M

Steve M

Steve M

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Joined
14 Dec 2007
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1,587
Hi all.

Daughter has the following PC:

AMD Athlon 64 3200+
Corsair 2GB XMS 3200C2PT DDR400 (2x 512MB, 1x 1GB)
ATI Radeon 2400 Pro 256MB
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy
DFI LANPARTY UT nForce3 250Gb
Hitachi Deskstar 7K160 160GB SATA-II 8MB
LiteON DH-20A1S-18C 20x DVD±RW SATA Dual Layer ReWriter
TAGAN TG-380-U01 380W PSU.

I built this myself from bits i had lying around in January 08 and been running like a charm on XP Pro with SP2.

Couple of days ago upgraded to SP3. It installed fine but afterwards i noticed PC was very slow. Went into the task manager and discovered the CPU constantly at 50% with no applications running. The culprit was 'svchost.exe' but ending task on this had no affect with CPU still hovering at 50% but sometimes going up to 100%. I killed every process that Windows would let me in the task manager but still the high CPU usage.

To cut a long story short i did a fresh install of windows from the disk and installed SP3 and guess what..same thing. As soon as the PC booted into the Windows desktop for the first time on a fresh install after formating the HD it was still thrashing the CPU.

any ideas guys?

Oh btw, my PC running SP3 running fine with no issues:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 6000+
OCZ 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-6400C4 800MHz Reaper HPC Enhanced Bandwidth Edition Dual Channel DDR2
BFG GeForce 8800 GT OC2 512MB
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio 7.1
MSI K9N Neo V3 nForce 560
Seagate Barracuda 160GB 7200RPM
Maxtor 200GB SATA 7200RPM
Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.11 SATA-II 32MB Cache
NEC ND-3500A Dual Layer 16x DVD±RW ReWriter
OCZ StealthXStream 600w Silent SLI Ready ATX2 PSU
 
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Grab Sysinternals Process Explorer, and have a look at the threads running inside the instance of svchost.exe that is causing the high load.

I'm pretty sure its going to be wuaueng.dll that is causing the issue, as it seems to be a problem that has resurfaced after last years WU fiasco, only the same fixes aren't working this time around.

If this is the case with your PC, the only 100% working fix, is to stop the automatic updates service (NET STOP WUAUSERV), or disable it completely in services.msc.
 
Thanks for the quick reply!

NET STOP WUAUSERV had no effect.

Using Process Explorer it seems 'hardware interrupts' is the cause of the CPU thrashing. I cannot kill this process though...
 
No, you most certainly cannot kill Hardware Interrupts. And indeed if Hardware Interrupts is causing the CPU load, you either have a hardware problem, or an error in the OS at HAL level.

So nothing was going on inside of svchost.exe?
 
No nothing in svchost.exe.

Literally only had this issue since SP3 and as i said is present with a fresh install. Wonder if there is any way to find out which piece of hardware is causing this?
 
OK, hardware wise i have tried it with only the HD,CPU, PSU, KB and mouse and 1 stick of RAM (tested in all 3 slots) and still the problem persists!
 
Deffo not hardware related. Just installed Vista Ultimate x64 and CPU idles at 0% usage so has to be related to SP3. Any ideas anyone?
 
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