CPU usage hits the ceiling several times

AV update and search eat up alot of computer resources, I strongly recommend you to try to kill as much not needed processes as you can. We have found HP printers management solution, Norton Ghost, sometimes Adobe Reader, just for mention a few use alot of memory/processor. Try www.sysinternals.com for Process Explorer and find out all the applications running, the resources they use and what are they for.

Good luck

See what is running with more info than Task Manager:

PROCESS VIEWERS
What's Running 2.1.1
http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx
Quick Access InfoBar
http://www.processlibrary.com/quickaccess/
Win Tasks Pro
http://www.liutilities.com/

Check out my list of other FREEBIES I know of.
http://thedapper.mine.nu:1701/tech/quick.rtf

I would also try to do some clean ups (also on my list), have the computer do a chkdsk during boot up, and afterwards, a defrag.

Any help with any of this, let me know.

Heaps of thanks so far. I will try them out.

This Q&A will be closed on Monday, because after that it will disappear in the crowd.

Have a nice weekend

\Gunnar

Depending on what AV software you use you may want to try a re-install when this happens or possibly going with a different AV solution. Symantec and McAffee's products are both very resource intensive and the situation you describe is not that uncommon. I would schedule nightly system scans when noone is actually using the system.

As for the other situation I've found this problem often happens with certain poorly written Java stuff. Java spikes up and hogs the CPU. Might want to upgrade your java version if you find this to be the case. If you identify that the issue is caused by other applications that are repeat offenders try re-installing them or see if they have software updates you have not installed.

TinyResMeter is a small tool that display usefull realtime system resources informations, but it also give much more details thru context menu when you right-click over displayed fields !
Download free from http://perso.accelance.net/~pesoft/trm/us_trm.html
Do it at your own risk I recommend dont do anything without reading about the product.

This question was closed by the author