Hi all.

I have a problem that I hope someone can shed a bit of light on.

My PC is set up so that my various OS hard drives are fitted to cassettes, this way I can interchange these HD's into a cradle in the tower enabling my to use a number of different OS as I require or need for any particular reason.

The last drive I have just built up is a 5 Gig Win ME OS.

But I have discover a problem that has me stumped

When I have my 80Gig XP OS inserted in the machine, my CPU usage shows from about 3% to about 33% usage, but mainly closer to the 3 than the 33%.

When I replace the HD with the 5Gig Win ME HD (about 50% free space still on drive) I get a steady 100% CPU usage which eventually results in the freezing of the drive.

In the Sys tray I only have 5 programs running in the back ground, (same as on the XP drive). When I check the startup in MSCONFIG there also is only 5 programs running listed to start up upon booting.

I systematically switched off all the back ground working systems which included the fire wall, and AV program. I then did the 3 finger salute and turned off all other program listed as running until I only had Explorer running and AIDA32, which I activated just so that I can measure the CPU usage. This program does not usually run in the back ground.

I also switched off Explorer and received a blank blue desktop screen (not the BSOD) with just AIDA32 displayed, still I had 100% CPU usage. Explorer then restarted after a few seconds without my intervention.

I did a full 'AdAware' check for spyware, all clear. I ran a full 'Window Washer' and removed all Cookies, Histories and all Temp files. I also went into Internet Explorer>Properties and did a delete of histories and cookies from there just in case anything got missed

I also did a full AV check in safe mode to get the best results, still 100% usage.

It's got me beat. Any ideas?

Regards

Thinking hurts my head

JANSET, FWIW, thought for you to consider, ME, as it came from the box, was a notorious memory hog. It failed to properly release memory properly after it was done using it. Common problem. Solution was some sort of third party memory manager (I personally used free Cacheman). You can tremendously improve ME's performance if you'll read/apply 'Trev's Tweaks ...' @:
http://www.burzurq.com/forum/trevtweak.html
HTH.
Ed in Texas.

Hi Janset,
Read my new posting regarding an infected Rundll32 ("Rundll exe overwrite?"), this is one reason for an inexplicable 100% CPU useage. Check yours by checking the date of installation in "properties".

Hi Guys.

I have used Cacheman in the past, but I can not remember ever checking out the CPU usage. I will look into it again.

sonofagun, I will look into your post also, but consider my next couple of paragraphs.

A further development which may backup 'Ed in Texas's' observations.

I inserted another drive that had Win2000 Pro and just as with XP, the CPU usage was low, in fact a bit lower than XP, but then it does not use as much Umph to run it.

I then fitted still another HD. This also had a Win ME OS, but on a 40 Gig HD (again about half storage space still available), and guess what?

Yep, the damn thing also registered 100% CPU usage.

"There be dragon at them thar edge of the map swabbies".

Regards

Thinking hurts my head

Strange indeed Janset, haven't got clue why that should be. A 40 Gig HD? It's not so long ago that my puny 20 Gig was the ultimate!