woah, CPU usage at 100% constantly

Mr. Redundant

Mr. Redundant

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Im using Winxp and for some reason my CPU is at 100% constant useage.
anyone have any idea why this is happening?
 
yeah, I just checked out my processes, got some weird ones on here.. ran ad-aware it found nothing unusual though... no viruses... gonna try spybot.
thanks Pen
 
Could you name the processes here that are the culprites?
 
MaxiKana said:
Could you name the processes here that are the culprites?
Click to expand...


oh crap

I tried all kinds of things to correct it:
hijackthis
Spybot
Ad-aware
AVG virus scan
McAffee
Norton

none of them detected anything wrong with my system...
so as a last resort I formatted, I have a partition for windows (learned the hard way) so its easy to format and re-install my OS.

anyway, I get it all up and running... and blam... still 100% cpu usage.

the process that was, And IS eating my CPU cycles is "SVCHOST" it is using around 50-70%
(and CPU usage is at 100% constantly)

I have searched and tried everything that I can find relating to it... but I cant seem to find a solution... usually formatting works.
 
What if you just end that process, SVCHOST? What happens?
 
why don't you end process it? I don't think it could mess up your computer any more than it is now, but my track record for helping people today isn't very good.
 
i had this problem once... my sys idel tray was sucking up 80-100% but the actuall CPU was only 6%... i say just leave it but if you see a * prossess or .*. then your in some shit probly... what CPU you got? i tryed running diablo 2 on my 933 mhz P3 256(crappy ram) and it ended up killlinh my comp... probly cause it was a piece of crap o begin with
 
ending svchost just springs another one forth (its a normal windows process)
either that or it brings up the "windows will now restart in 60 seconds" window (RPC)

EDIT: I have a P4 3ghz (geniune intel)
running in Win xp pro

its not the blaster worm (I tried symantecs worm removal) its not a trojan (I used trojanguard)

:/

its frustrating because its affecting my games, everynow and then it will stick.
very annoying.
 
you probably have a virus that is eating all your system resources

[Edit]: Try throwing up a firewall, see if there is any unwanted inbound/outbound traffic. I think it is some sort of virus/trojan.
 
blahblahblah said:
you probably have a virus that is eating all your system resources
Click to expand...
nope, not only did I use 4 different virus checkers before I formatted..
I just FORMATTED ;P I scanned my bios, so its not there either.

thats just it, could my motherboard or cpu be damaged?
if so why would one process eat 50-70 resources?
 
You said you have a partition right? Could the virus be in that partition?

The nasty viruses are usually smart enough to disable or hide from the AntiVirus checkers if they get on your computer.
 
blahblahblah said:
You said you have a partition right? Could the virus be in that partition?

The nasty viruses are usually smart enough to disable or hide from the AntiVirus checkers if they get on your computer.
Click to expand...

nope, I scanned both partitions, with all software.
thank you for the suggestions though :)
 
as i said... i had this problem starting a few weeks ago and evrey now N then i have it again... some times my games lag after a while of playing but i jsut restart...
 
TrinityXero said:
as i said... i had this problem starting a few weeks ago and evrey now N then i have it again... some times my games lag after a while of playing but i jsut restart...
Click to expand...

its consistent, regardless of restarting. ( I have restarted like 500 times today)

I checked my cpu setup in my bios... its all correct, except the temp of the CPU is about 139 degrees F (round 60 degress C)
should I be alarmed?
 
Mr. Redundant said:
its consistent, regardless of restarting. ( I have restarted like 500 times today)

I checked my cpu setup in my bios... its all correct, except the temp of the CPU is about 139 degrees F (round 60 degress C)
should I be alarmed?
Click to expand...

Given that bios temps are usually off no. That temp sounds about right if your CPU usage is 100% constant.

Why don't you try ending all non-critical services and see what happens.
 
it can be one of mnny resons

#1 eather you got seriously !@#$ed bad by a virus

#2 your CPU is shot

#3 your ram is shot

#4 your mother board is fryed (diablo II did that to me) ~ blizzard games suck $#!^

#5 your just in some whierd !@#$
 
nothing affects it
the only thing that causes 100% cpu useage is SVCHOST (there are multiple instances, which is normal.. but one of them eats all the cycles)
I can close the other instances of SCVhost, but when I try to close the one eating up my CPU it crashes with an RPC error

"Win NT authority is shutting down" gives me about 60 seconds countdown, then restarts
refered to as a Remote Procedure Call Error.
I searched online, and its a security leak in Winxp.. however I fixed that ages ago.

the SVCHOST has a bunch of services associated with it, and obviously is critical to the OS... I just dont know why all of a sudden its eating so much CPU.

so far CPU cycles are normal, after I restarted... I didnt do anything special, so it was random... however Im pretty confident the problem will arise in a couple minutes.
 
Right, go to the control panel, go to adminstrative tools, then services.

Try turning off some of the services in there, and see if one of them is what's eating your CPU.
 
look for a rouge IEXPLORER.EXE running at full but there being no window, its either some bug or some annoying malicious popup from porn/warez sites, a few people get them
 
Fenric said:
look for a rouge IEXPLORER.EXE running at full but there being no window, its either some bug or some annoying malicious popup from porn/warez sites, a few people get them
Click to expand...

I use mozilla FIREFOX, I just formatted so I really dont know how a virus would survive, unless it wrote itself to bios... which is clean, I scanned for IEXPLORER.EXE but only found the regular IEXPLORER.exe in the IE directory.

and wouldnt it show up as being in use if it was?
Epsi said:
Right, go to the control panel, go to adminstrative tools, then services.
Click to expand...
tried this, had the Taskmanager window open the whole time I activated and de-activated different services... still no effect.

as I said it shows SCVHOST as being the culprit... I just cant fix it/dont know why... and its effecting my gaming.
 
it only shows up in task manager if its there, and its not a virus its just a popup or something
 
Fenric said:
it only shows up in task manager if its there, and its not a virus its just a popup or something
Click to expand...

nothing there, besides the normal windows stuff...
 
Well if your really desperate I would suggest you reformat BOTH pratitions and start form a completely clean slate. Then if you still have the problem it will pretty much have to be hardware related.
 
I did some quick searching and found a couple of things that may be of interest. First, a description of the svchost.exe service.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;250320

And then another forum post on some random site where people suggest checking for the welchia (blaster variation basically) and some other worm.

http://www.computing.net/windows2000/wwwboard/forum/56319.html

Either way this is not going to be a hardware problem. Please don't run out and buy new hardware. =) On the chance that it's a worm that starts during boot (as suggested in that other forum) you can format your MBR (master boot record) by typing (from a boot disk) fdisk /mbr But don't do that if you're running multiple OS's. It does sound like a virus, worm or general software problem. And you did indeed wipe your windows drive but the virus could still have been residing on any exe or zip file on your second partition. And as soon as a program it was attached to was run again everything could easily be re-infected.

I would reccomend:
Updating windows to the fullest extent
Getting and updating a good anti-virus program and scanning. (AVG seems pretty cool if you cant afford to buy norton)
Re-formatting your C drive and also formatting your MBR.
Formating the whole thing.

Good luck!
 
thanks guys for all the suggestions...
I got rid of the CPU useage by reformatting again, seems to be gone... but it spikes

no matter what game I play, and no matter what settings I play in.. my cpu freezes every couple minutes.

@Noodly: hehe I actually read all that this morning (been on my damn computer all day, trying EVERYTHING) formatting my Master Boot Record sounds dangerous... and the link you had doesnt load for me... could you quote the site on what to do?
 
Man, that really sucks. I've had some nasty problems with svchost.exe in the past, but nothing of this calibre.

Is there any tests you can do to determine if it's faulty hardware? And if so, are you under warranty? :)
 
Bad^Hat said:
Man, that really sucks. I've had some nasty problems with svchost.exe in the past, but nothing of this calibre.

Is there any tests you can do to determine if it's faulty hardware? And if so, are you under warranty? :)
Click to expand...
I have no idea what kind of tests I could do to determine if it was my hardware...
and no Im not currently under warranty.. .it ran out like 2 months ago lol

however if its faulty I would most likely just upgrade.
:/ but I dont reaaaaally want to just yet.
 
FIXED!! HUZZAH!

turns out I had the W32.HLLW.Gaobot.gen worm
I found it by using an online scanner by Symantec (www.symantec.com)

apparently the 3 virus scanners I used were "tampered with" by the worm itself.
and even though I used both Mcaffee and norton (and AVG) as well as scanning online with housecalls, it wasnt detected.

anywhoo turns out the worm infects your PC via weak networks (aka non-updated winxp... as in the comp I formatted which was my host. bah)
and uses the RPC protocol to wreak havok on your system.

how I finally got rid of it:

scanned with Symantec's online scanner - found the W32.HllW.Gaobot.Gen worm

downloaded their Gaobot worm removal software

restarted in safe-mode

unzipped and ran the gaobot-fix

detected that SVCMGMT.EXE was infected (but didnt delete it) it fixed some registry errors, but when I restarted it was right back there so I had to:

use the RUn command, and type: "cmd" to bring up the dos prompt

then C:\windows\system32\


renamed SVCMGMT.EXE to SVCMGMT.alp (but you coulda named it anything, I renamed it because you cant close it outright.. it starts itself back up, if you rename it however, and then close it you can then delete the renamed file and...... its gone)

Deleted the renamed .alp file and poof
all is well that ends well

my system is back to 100% efficiency :D!!

thank you goes out to all those who helped me and suggested things along the way.

hope this helps anyone else who SUFFERS from this problem.
(sheesh what an annoyance)
 
Awesome, back to running spreadsheet on 100% :)
 
Bad^Hat said:
Awesome, back to running spreadsheet on 100% :)
Click to expand...
hehe

Im just so relieved everything is working properly again.
since it was affecting games BADLY (not just windows) any game, would freeze every 1-2 mins, ... was horrible..

with my godlike system Im not used to seeing fps dip below 60, let alone stick :(
:)
 
i recently heard something about a windows patch that had a flaw in it that in some cases caused you to have 100% cpu usage, the patch came out around the time of your post.. hey ya never know!! check it out!!
 
ok, did you say you have Norton Anti virus? I have had mjor problems similar to what you decribed here and Norton was the culprit! Try Disabling Auto protect and see what happens. Also, when you re-installed windows, did you install a firewall and anti virus before you connected to the net? If not then you most probably have a virus or trojan horse! When I reinstalled I stupidly left my Broadband modem plugged in and within seconds of installing windows I already had a virus and a few trojan horses!! I had to unplug my modem, re-install and then install my firewall and antivirus an then plug in the modem (UPDATE VIRUS AND FIREWALL BEFORE DOING WINDOWS UPDATE!!)
 
brisck1 said:
ok, did you say you have Norton Anti virus? I have had mjor problems similar to what you decribed here and Norton was the culprit! Try Disabling Auto protect and see what happens. Also, when you re-installed windows, did you install a firewall and anti virus before you connected to the net? If not then you most probably have a virus or trojan horse! When I reinstalled I stupidly left my Broadband modem plugged in and within seconds of installing windows I already had a virus and a few trojan horses!! I had to unplug my modem, re-install and then install my firewall and antivirus an then plug in the modem (UPDATE VIRUS AND FIREWALL BEFORE DOING WINDOWS UPDATE!!)
Click to expand...

I dont have the firewall enabled, and I dont have Norton installed either.
the virus I had stopped software I was running on my computer (like norton, mcaffee, AVG) from working correctly, and msconfig would close after being open a couple seconds.

thats why the only way I found I had the worm, was with an online scan from norton. I found it had inhabited my MSCVMGMT (or something like that) file, and although the fix for the worm could remove the registry keys, it couldnt delete the file.
so I had to rename, close the process with taskmanager and then remove the renamed file.

then to be thorough I formatted (I have a partition, formatting my Operating system drive is nothing... I highly recommend it if you havent made one)

before I did though I downloaded the security patches from microsoft, the worm fix, and anything else essential to my OS, and patching it so this worm didnt come back.. slapped that on my D (games drive) and installed em over to C once it was nice and clean (and before I touched the internet).

that cleared it all up. :) I did a couple virus and adware checks and then ran another online scan with norton, just to be safe.

and nothing.. Im as clean as the space between my ears :D
 
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