Help! Seems like my laptop is dying :(

[newsh]

I'm away from home at the mo (in Japan) and having trouble with this laptop suddenly. I went to read my webmail and the pc froze, ctl alt del eventually gave me the manager and shows 100% cpu usage. Trying to quit Skype did the same thing on another reboot and it froze againe when AVG went to update itself. I've done a system restore to 2 days ago, still the same, full virus scan also, nothing found, deleted all cache and cookies, cleared some space on the hard drive by deleting a couple of gigs of music etc. Im running XP pro.
As you can see I have no trouble accessing the forum.
It seemed to start when I was having trouble accessing a wireless lan yesterday (it went on today though). Outlook will recieve but not send mail.
Any ideas?

[waad_uk]

When in windows task manager, click on the 'Processes' tab, then click the cpu header on the little table. This will sort the processes by the amount of cpu they are using.

That will give you a clue as to the culprit.

[Markarina]

I found when I was working in Japan for a while that the ISP blocked certain applications, one that comes to mind was the VOIP phone.

In the meantime go have some okonomi-yaki or find a good yakitori bar, I do miss the japanese food

[s2_bo]

John, If you can locate what application is using all the processing power it should be quite easy to isolate what the problem is. As long as its no the System Idle Process that is eating all your power and not releasing it to other applications as it should.

If you find that a random program is using loads of power you can always end its task and see if it changes.

Good luck.

[newsh]

Everything was going ok for a while till I went to a website with flash then mozilla (firefox) grabbed all the cpu and I had to do a hard restart, task manager would not stop the process, so it seems like it might be to do with flash, or at least certain types of web page, trying to update AVG, trying to close Skype (which was offline) and trying to read aol webmail all cause the problem. In each case the relevant program will hog the cpu..
I found the flash updater and ran that and it found an update so I'll try again, hey I'm going to be awake all night anyway :-/

[newsh]

Oh and PS yes the food is fantastic

[newsh]

Nope, still does it, maybe a problem with Java?

[newsh]

I've downloaded and run latest DirectX and Java, no joy.

Still freezes when I go to aol (on the read mail page)

[newsh]

I can get on Youtube but it freezes when I try to watch a video, what system is this that its having trouble with? Any web based movie stuff seems to mess it up.

[europeanme]

this is just my experience with a similar CPU useage rate.....it can be something on your desktop trying to open with a remote system (media player of some description)
After creating shortcuts instead of files on the desktop and deleting skype (it was the old ******ed version!!...) it worked a lot better....

good luck......* from across the 'other pond'*

[newsh]

I'm now trying a Reg cleaner prog. I only installed Skype a few weeks ago so don't think its that, tempted to dump it though.. Yeah I'm closer to you by going east from here I guess

[spink]

Newsh,are you going to be at the Makuhari messe Halls on saturday night by any chance?:mischeif:

[newsh]

Yes

[spink]

huh,its alright for some.Have fun.

[catgroom]

.

John! Hurro!

This is a wildcard,but try removing your Apple Quicktime Player if you have one installed.

Its complicated,and Im too tired to explain.It worked for me when I had this problem.

Steve