Okay, I have been encountering this strange problem for quite a while now. After countless hours of searching for an answer on google, my efforts have thus far been fruitless.

So here is the issue:

Often when a program freezes on my laptop it jumps to 50% cpu usage and has to be ended manually (Task manager -> End task) but if I try to run that process again after it has been closed, it will automatically jump back up to 50% cpu usage. This happens most often with explorer.exe but can happen to any process. In order to get the task running again I have to end additional programs which are using memory (eg. Firefox) before I can successfully re-start explorer.exe without it jumping to 50% cpu usage. This does not always work either.

Also, another strange thing, tasks sometimes jump to 50% out of nowhere (even tasks that are idling in the background). Tasks that get stuck at 50% cpu usage do not always freeze but instead are just extremely slow. Only one task does this at a time.

Even more strange is that sometimes, when I end a task that is at 50% cpu usage and click onto another task, that task becomes stuck at 50% cpu usage.

The probability of this problem occurring seems to increase with the length of time the laptop has been on or not completely shut off. I often hibernate my laptop instead of shut it off completely.

I do not believe this is an issue of "running out of memory" at least, not on the surface. My Commit Charge never goes over 1500M/2638M (my paging file is 1GB in size)

Laptop Specs:
Alienware area-51 m7700
Windows XP Home Edition Version 2002, Service Pack 2
Intel Pentium 4, 3.2ghz, single core
1.75gb of ram

Motherboard: CLEVO D900T
Bios: Phoenix Technologies LTD v6.00 01/16/2006

PS: If I can think of any other symptoms I will post them.

Hi mecorx, welcome to the PCHF.

Because of your CPU, and it has Hyper Threading technology...that 50% message actually means you're using 100% of your CPU...

Can you please follow the prework link in my signiture, and post the resultin g logs? One of our security team will take a look at them for you

Here is my hijackthis log. I would have posted it with my first post but I didn't see the edit button. (Jeez I feel a little stupid... )

Attached Files

hijackthis.log (8.4 KB, 5 views)

This may help you (at least until the experts solve the real issue), I was having the same type of issue myself and discovered that it was "windows update" that was causing the problem. Using this utility I was able to see under which process it was running and disable it and enable it whenever I needed to.

This tool that will allow you to not only see what services are running but also allow you to decide which ones should be running or not!

It lists all the processes’ that are listed under the ambiguous "SVCHOST" name listed in Task Manager (among others). Basically it is a kicked up version of your Windows Task Manager app and shows MUCH more info and actually lets you manipulate it.

I was able to free up more memory and processor resources by knowing exactly which process I was ending.

Here is the link...
Process Explorer for Windows v10.21

download link is at bottom of page...

i actually used to have a similar problem with full cpu loading, it normally happens when a file becomes corrupt or infected with a virus or similar, but if its happening with several apps, it may be a corrupt/infected windows service, thats trying to run something with the frozen service

When I try to run something with a frozen service, sometimes it executes whatever command I issue like 5 minutes later, sometimes it doesn't do anything and stays frozen until crashed. However, once I had a fullscreen game pegged at 50% cpu usage, it was still playable but lagged a lot, almost as if norton antivirus system scan were suddenly running in the background of a pentium 3 with 256mb of ram (quite slow, heh).

I already have that program and couldn't find anything suspicious with it either.