Invisible CPU consumption - WinXP

[Dave Sell]

My computer crawled to a halt and all I had open was a browser and Visual C# Express 2008.

I could not even get back to taskmangler, as the disk was thrashing like crazy.

So I hit reset, and rebooted to find out whats going on. Same thrashing, but no process seems to be responsible for it. I sorted my processes by CPU, and only idle was up at the top at 99%. Everything else was essentially zero.

Netstat shows nothing interesting:

C:\Documents and Settings\Admin>netstat

Active Connections

  Proto  Local Address          Foreign Address        State

C:\Documents and Settings\Admin>

However there is definately something going on under my hood. Any ideas how I can track this mystery cpu consumption down?

[Dave Sell]

If it helps, these are the listed processes:

[Nightwalker83]

Hi Dave,

I'm not sure i this would help but scan the system for viruses and malware on the system. Also, I think there would be a "Memory Diagnostic Tool" located under "Administrative Tools" in the control panel (at least there is in Vista).

Edit:

In Windows XP it looks like it might be in the "Performance" section under "Administrative Tools".

[Lord Orwell]

i would start by making sure you have all xml updates available from windows update. There are a bunch of VERY common security exploits on the internet that try to install malicious code by exploiting xml. Patches plug the known holes, but if you've already got something in-system, you won't fix it with patches. This is all i can think of with only those two things open, and with nothing showing up in that list, it's either spyware with a tricky name (such as "services"), or a virus.

[Dave Sell]

Ya after anti-virus scan, nothing found by MalWareBytes, still the mystery CPU cycles!

[Lord Orwell]

try an on-line virus scanner then.

first though, run msconfig and show us the list of programs running at startup.

[Dave Sell]

Well I put the harddrive in a drawer, and installed vista this weekend. If I end up rebooting to the old harddrive I will put up more info.

[Dave Sell]

OK so I went thru this BS - I believe the CPU cycles belong to the RAID-5 rebuilding functionality of the Promise Raid controller I have installed.

I went Vista for a while, but as per above link, was forced to return to the XP boot drive, as Promise did not make Vista drivers for my RAID card.

Things were good until the Local PAM software tried to rebuild a bad cable problem.

Now that it is rebuilding the RAID-5 drive, things look the same as the mysterious CPU cycle consumption.

P.S. past 2 weeks i have not seen the CPU consumption until now.