M
Menno Hershberger
Flightless Bird
eMachine - Windows XP SP3
A lady brought this machine to me because it had slowed to a crawl. Task
Manager was showing high CPU usage (40%-90%) although it didn't show what
process(es) were using it. Showed System Idle process 90-99%. Process
Explorer identified the culprit as "Hardware Interrupts". In msconfig I
disabled all the startup items and all non-Microsoft services. That didn't
help. The problem did not exist in Safe Mode. It also did not exist in
normal mode if I chose diagnostic startup in msconfig. That disables ALL
services and makes Windows useless. So I re-enabled all the Microsoft
services and the problem returned. In task manager I started randomly
killing the processes that would allow it. When I killed wuauclt.exe the
problem ceased. So I turned off Windows Update, re-enabled all the non-
Microsoft services and startup items that had been originally enabled.
Everything is still okay. So I went to the Windows Update site to make sure
the updates were up to date, and got an error message that automatic
updates had to be turned on. So that's where I'm stuck now. Everything is
fine as long as Automatic Updates is hut off. I tired turning it back on
just to confirm that was the problem and it went right back to the original
behavior.
Avira, Malwarebytes, SuperAntispyware were all run in Safe Mode. SAS found
a few cookies. The lady said it was working fine the night before last and
the problem started when she booted it up this morning.
Sorry I was so long winded, but I was trying to answer all the questions
that I'm bound to be asked ahead of time.
What do I do about Windows Automatic Update?
--
--- Long live Fat32! ---
A lady brought this machine to me because it had slowed to a crawl. Task
Manager was showing high CPU usage (40%-90%) although it didn't show what
process(es) were using it. Showed System Idle process 90-99%. Process
Explorer identified the culprit as "Hardware Interrupts". In msconfig I
disabled all the startup items and all non-Microsoft services. That didn't
help. The problem did not exist in Safe Mode. It also did not exist in
normal mode if I chose diagnostic startup in msconfig. That disables ALL
services and makes Windows useless. So I re-enabled all the Microsoft
services and the problem returned. In task manager I started randomly
killing the processes that would allow it. When I killed wuauclt.exe the
problem ceased. So I turned off Windows Update, re-enabled all the non-
Microsoft services and startup items that had been originally enabled.
Everything is still okay. So I went to the Windows Update site to make sure
the updates were up to date, and got an error message that automatic
updates had to be turned on. So that's where I'm stuck now. Everything is
fine as long as Automatic Updates is hut off. I tired turning it back on
just to confirm that was the problem and it went right back to the original
behavior.
Avira, Malwarebytes, SuperAntispyware were all run in Safe Mode. SAS found
a few cookies. The lady said it was working fine the night before last and
the problem started when she booted it up this morning.
Sorry I was so long winded, but I was trying to answer all the questions
that I'm bound to be asked ahead of time.
What do I do about Windows Automatic Update?
--
--- Long live Fat32! ---