Hi - not posted before - hope someone can provide some advice / guidance ref a serious performance issue on my daughters Amilo L1310G which shee needs for her university work.
Essentially, the machine runs at 100% CPU, becomes unresponsive, locks up and occasionally crashes. I spent most of Sunday establishing there were no viruses on the machine. Norton did not detect anything. The behaviour is very strange, if I look at the process list in task manager, the machine was running at 100% CPU, (Firefox, Word, Powerpoint, MSN Messenger, iTunes, Norton 360). I shut down the highest utilisation application - at this time it was Powerpoint, I expected the CPU to reduce, but once PP closed Word then consumed the remaining CPU - again the machine ran at 100%. Stop Word, then Firefox consumed the remainder of the CPU, again 100%.
I thought we definately had a virus, but could not confirm this.
As this machine is causing so much trouble for my daughter I believed it would be a good idea to rebuild the OS (XP Home) to ensure it was stable.
I rebuilt it without problems, on Tuesday, installed MS Office 2003, AVG Antivirus, Zone Alarm and nothing else. Scanned the machine with AVG - all looked clean. She used it for the first time again today.
Again today the machine is locking up, 100% CPU for extended periods.
I checked to see if any of the firmware / BIOS updates resolved performance issues, but they do not appear to have any fixes.
I am stumped - looks like a virus but no evidence, could be an OS issue but all patches are on for XP, and after reload would not expect to see the same issues.
Could it be hardware related ?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Regards Tony