A Dual Core CPU riddle "Solved"

Update to let you know what it was.

Last week I was on holidays and while I was gone one of the techs came buy and removed my dev card from the chassis and repaced it with the new version. Which was a nice thing because I had been waiting for the new version. But he did not tell me that he had done it, and he had not bothered to re-load the code running on the card.

I used Eezy's suggestion and used Process Explorer. It pointed to the hardware interrupt thrashing like crazy.

Once I uninstalled the card the CPU settled down all nice and quiet.

Thanks for the help all.

Garrad

Hoping someone might have seen this before.

I have a chassis here at work that has 2 AMD dual Core processors on it. I am running XP Pro with a minimal software load. Basically the machine has a base windows XP install and out software.

This morning I re-booted and I noticed the machine was acting sluggishly... I did a quick check and one of the CPUs was spiked at 100%. This is fresh from re-boot with no software actively running.

While Task Manger shows the CPU spike it shows no task consuming any CPU and no tasks running that should not be running.

I have run virus scans and spy ware scans. The only change to the machine was a security patch to windows for Windows Media Player.

As an additional note when I booted into Safe Mode, the CPU was not spiked.

Has anyone seen anything similar?

While Task Manger shows the CPU spike it shows no task consuming any CPU and no tasks running that should not be running.

That is rather odd. No corresponding network activity or anything, I'm assuming.

Latest BIOS, mboard chipset drivers, video card drivers, etc?

It's not that stupid fast indexing service, is it?

Latest BIOS, mboard chipset drivers, video card drivers, etc?

Yes and the machine was fine first thing in the morning

It's not that stupid fast indexing service, is it?

I will have to check that... Seemd the CPU was spiked the majority of the day, and after several reboots.

Where would i check to see if that was runnng

Go to Sysinternals and get Process Explorer, think of it a Task Manager on steriods. It should help you determine which service is pegging the CPU.

I second what Eezy said. I was thinking about wintop, but Process Explorer is better

Do you know which HAL you're using? (Device Manager -> Computer) It should be listed as ACPI Multiprocessor PC -- I saw an issue once-upon-a-time where a PC had been incorrectly configured to use MPS Multiprocessor PC instead and it exhibited the same behavior you mention.