Processor activity spikes every 2 seconds

I just started having this problem yesterday and its driving me mad.

It all began with my mouse pointer "sticking" in place for a moment every 2 seconds. I thought this was weird, so I opened the Task Manager and set the actualization velocity to "high". Then I noticed that every 4 "ticks" (=2 sec) the CPU usage spikes to 66%, the next tick it goes back to 0%. At this moment I had no programs turned on.

I started working on word, hoping the problem would just go away. But still, every 2 seconds anything I typed seemed to freeze and then it showed suddenly the following tick. I decided to try and see if this affected mp3's, so I turned on Winamp and played a tune. Every 2 seconds, the music froze for a moment and then went on.

Already getting angry. I solved to reboot the system... but the problem was still there.

I thought maybe I had a virus or some kind of adware or spyware. So I ran PestPatrol and Norton Antivirus (both updated 2 days ago), with no results.

Then I thought that maybe my HD was faulty. So I ran Scandisk, restarted my laptop, waited for scandisk to finish its run and when Windows finally loaded. The processor still spiked to 66% every 2 seconds!

I tried then to do a cold reboot (pressing the power button 10 seconds), turning on and off the system several times... but that damned 66% spike every 2 seconds was still there.

I tried to shut down all running programs (and background programs) in the task manager. But the spikes were still there.

Finally I tried suspending my lap. When I turned it on again, the spikes where gone!

Great!, I thought. But then I restarted my machine... and the spikes were there again.

I have no clue what is happening to my laptop. Despite I have found a way to go around the problem (suspending the system and starting it up again) Has anyone got any idea what might be causing this? I haven't installed anything in the last week and I had never had that problem before. My system specs are:

Inspiron 8200, Win XP, P4 at 2.4Ghz, 512MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9000, HD 40Gb.

Hope someone has any idea of what could this be... any help is greatly appreciated

Drakestail.

Message Edited by Drakestail on 02-19-2004 08:05 PM