Was lurking the forums here - I have a new 17R SE with BOOT/BIOS issues and while bouncing back to the top of the forum your subject line caught my eye. I was just intrigued on how being plugged in shoots the CPU to 100% along with your statement about Sysinternals not picking up anything - SO I figured this is interesting and hey google is my friend lo and behold I found a link form someone with and HP laptop having the same issue - take a read, looks like for them it was a wall outlet issue.
EDIT: Oh and here's a first a One Hit Search Engine Wonder- using Bing search "Power Cord causing 100% CPU" it returns exactly one link (one above).
Well for now, that is, until the bingbot crawls your post :D
Edit 2: OK it must be getting late, ran that search again and I got a lot of returns.. now it must be getting late here 4:11am or Bing glitched but I swear I only saw one line oh not counting the stupid ad link.
OK folks bed time for me. LOL
OK Edit 3 so I lied didn't go to bed yet but Dan - you may want to read this one as well - turns out for this person, and I have to give them credit for linking it all together because heck it's so far flung I have no clue even after reading their post how iit is that they figured it was because of them being plugged in, the Event Viewer Service having something to do with it and the Security Log being Full causing 100% CPU on AC Power but not Batter is beyond me. http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/topic/307426-laptop-becomes-very-slow-100-cpu-use-after-plugging-in/
Last - perhaps check the actual power cord I see tons of posts from people saying that theirs was bent to much and that caused 100% CPU while plugged in or perhaps it got stripped as others found out or even some saying the Power Supply itself went bad. All possible issues.
Cheers and now really going to bed my eyes can't even focus anymore.
thanks very much for your lengthy response(s). The reason I tried taking the power cable out was because I had read that post! I'll read further on the logs being too large. That sounds unlikely...
I also tried a couple of other things.
I disabled quick charging (?) in the BIOS and I have disabled the Dell Webcam utility. I would really like to remove all the Dell software and try a clean install but this is my wife's work machine so I have to be careful not to ruin it.
Having the same problem here on my old Inspiron 1521. I inherited two others from my sister and niece, so I have two power supplies (one was discarded due to a damaged wire). It turns out that one of the power supplies causes this problem. This particular power supply also won't charge the battery (the one good battery left out of the three computers). I can easily repro the problem by moving the power supply to one of the other systems. I have one good power supply and all systems work fine with it, but using the bad power supply causes all systems to use excessive CPU cycles, and like the original poster, the most noticeable final symptom of the inability to play video. I even found that the problem occurs in safe mode. I don't know enough to have a theory about how a power supply could cause this problem, but I have clear results after spending hours tracking this problem down.
I ended up purchasing a new Dell power supply and still no resolution to the problem. This machine is not in a good state but have spent too much time trying to fix it. My wife is planning on getting a Mac for her next work machine and though I dislike Apple I can't see a reason for her not to buy one.
CyberMaxX360
272 Posts
0
January 23rd, 2013 00:00
Hey Dan,
Was lurking the forums here - I have a new 17R SE with BOOT/BIOS issues and while bouncing back to the top of the forum your subject line caught my eye. I was just intrigued on how being plugged in shoots the CPU to 100% along with your statement about Sysinternals not picking up anything - SO I figured this is interesting and hey google is my friend lo and behold I found a link form someone with and HP laptop having the same issue - take a read, looks like for them it was a wall outlet issue.
h30434.www3.hp.com/.../811
EDIT: Oh and here's a first a One Hit Search Engine Wonder- using Bing search "Power Cord causing 100% CPU" it returns exactly one link (one above).
Well for now, that is, until the bingbot crawls your post :D
Edit 2: OK it must be getting late, ran that search again and I got a lot of returns.. now it must be getting late here 4:11am or Bing glitched but I swear I only saw one line oh not counting the stupid ad link.
OK folks bed time for me. LOL
OK Edit 3 so I lied didn't go to bed yet but Dan - you may want to read this one as well - turns out for this person, and I have to give them credit for linking it all together because heck it's so far flung I have no clue even after reading their post how iit is that they figured it was because of them being plugged in, the Event Viewer Service having something to do with it and the Security Log being Full causing 100% CPU on AC Power but not Batter is beyond me. http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/topic/307426-laptop-becomes-very-slow-100-cpu-use-after-plugging-in/
Last - perhaps check the actual power cord I see tons of posts from people saying that theirs was bent to much and that caused 100% CPU while plugged in or perhaps it got stripped as others found out or even some saying the Power Supply itself went bad. All possible issues.
Cheers and now really going to bed my eyes can't even focus anymore.
sq8r
8 Posts
0
January 23rd, 2013 06:00
CyberMAx,
thanks very much for your lengthy response(s). The reason I tried taking the power cable out was because I had read that post! I'll read further on the logs being too large. That sounds unlikely...
I also tried a couple of other things.
I disabled quick charging (?) in the BIOS and I have disabled the Dell Webcam utility. I would really like to remove all the Dell software and try a clean install but this is my wife's work machine so I have to be careful not to ruin it.
thanks, Dan
tonyhinkle
1 Message
0
September 1st, 2013 12:00
Having the same problem here on my old Inspiron 1521. I inherited two others from my sister and niece, so I have two power supplies (one was discarded due to a damaged wire). It turns out that one of the power supplies causes this problem. This particular power supply also won't charge the battery (the one good battery left out of the three computers). I can easily repro the problem by moving the power supply to one of the other systems. I have one good power supply and all systems work fine with it, but using the bad power supply causes all systems to use excessive CPU cycles, and like the original poster, the most noticeable final symptom of the inability to play video. I even found that the problem occurs in safe mode. I don't know enough to have a theory about how a power supply could cause this problem, but I have clear results after spending hours tracking this problem down.
sq8r
8 Posts
0
September 5th, 2013 04:00
Hi Tony,
I ended up purchasing a new Dell power supply and still no resolution to the problem. This machine is not in a good state but have spent too much time trying to fix it. My wife is planning on getting a Mac for her next work machine and though I dislike Apple I can't see a reason for her not to buy one.
dan