Hi Peeps, nooby here

My pc runs fine most of the time, but now my CPU starts running at 100%, and then hangs, I hit the power button for 5 seconds, laptop turns off, then I restart, and everything is fine again.
I do not run any resourceful programs.
I use acronis disk director where I have made several images, of known good states. I have reverted to the first known good state with an image that was taken in February 2008. But the problem still exists? So could it be a hardware fault? I upgraded the memory about 4 months, and have added an HUAWEI modem for my internet.

Can anybody advise of a process as to find the problem? software or hardware issues?

thanks

Welcome to PCHF.

When you see your CPU starting to run at 100%,
Open the Task Manager
Click on the Precesses tab
Click on the CPU column
This will tell you which precess is running the most at the top of the Image Name column.
Until you know what the process is there is not much you can do to stop it. If the CPU locks up before you can open the Task Manager, suggest you open the Task Manager and leave it set up so the next time it locks up you can see the name of the process.

If this problem didn't occur before you upgraded your memory, suggest you download/run a free tester called memtest from majorgeeks.com (|MG| Free Download - MemTest 3.5).

If the memtest passes, then when you can let us know what process is hanging up your CPU.

Please do not post two threads for the same problem.
http://www.pchelpforum.com/new-hijac...tml#post282676

It might also be worth Looking At the "services" tab in the task manager and seeing what ones you can disable.

Start off with those connected to visual/ audio properties. You can get more information from the "descriptions" tab.

It could also pay off looking at the graphics properties in the "personalise" tab, play around with the resolutions and such.

You could consider using a "paging file" From the "Advanced" tab on System/"advanced system settings" which would allow you to allocate a chunk of HDD memory to buffer the ram. However this is a little touchy- it can work and sometimes dosent. I'd Do what gandalf guy says, and list the processes that are using a stupid ammount of CPU, say >10,000k