CPU Running 100% although idle

Question

Hello,I use CPiA366XT's (W98SE) for a long time and since a few days now I have a problem with one of them. The system monitor shows Kernel constantly at 100% although no program is in use and the task Idle is shown with about 98% and WinTop shows the idle task with nearly 100% as well. No matter any program is loaded or in use or not, the CPU load is shown 100% all the time from boot to shut down. And the computer gets very hot with the fan running all the time - I never ever had that before! I tried a tool called rain 1.0 and I found that Rain 1.0 can help against the high temperatures but this only helps in regular 32bit mode. And it doesn't lower the 100% CPU usage. The short time needed to power down or restart each time is enough to produce so much heat that the fan starts working again because during that time Rain 1.0 is not active.What makes the CPU work so hard performing that Idle task? The computer is not really slower than before, it is only hot and all the time running with 100%. I booted the CPiA from a DR DOS disk and it was the same: CPU was still really hot and fan didn't stop running although there was just the command prompt blinking and no program running. But when I ran the DELL diagnostics (all tests passed...) the fan ran only once a while. So is it a W98SE problem or a hardware problem? Mainboard or CPU board or BIOS? Thank you very much!

siliconslave · Answer

my first reaction to having 100% cpu usage all the time would be to say its something running on the system - have you got all the latest patches for the system, have you scanned it with an upto date virus scanner and addware scanner (does it still run on 100% if you start in safe mode? It seems very unlikely that you could still actually do stuff on the computer if it was a hardware problem using all the cpu cycles up. Have a look at the things running on your system using one of the advanced task managers (think there are some free ones availble called something like stop it)
good luck
Sam

micmens_9cba91 · Answer

Hi and thank you,I used AdAware, it found Alexa, I removed it, but that didn't help. I booted in safe mode but the MS system monitor can't be used then saying the 'PERF device driver' was missing and my second CPU monitoring software doesn't display anything at all in safe mode. But I'll try to find that 'stop it'.

micmens_9cba91 · Answer

Hi again,I found a download link for StopIt! 2.0 here and it's really a nice little tool (one single exe file, no installation required) trying to link to information in the internet about any running task you need information about. But besides the fact that the window isn't wide enough to show the whole path to the files that are executed StopIt! doesn't show the CPU percentage, so you don't know which task takes how much CPU time. So I didn't come further now, but thanks for the tip anyway!

micmens_9cba91 · Answer

I still didn't find a solution, any ideas perhaps?

Locked Topics – Laptops General

CPU Running 100% although idle

Was this post helpful?