Before I get to the problem, I'll give a little bit of history.  I was on my computer 
playing an online game about 2 weeks ago, when it froze out of the blue.  It was 
not responding to anything, so I hit the reset button on the tower and walked away 
for a while.  When I came back, the screen was completely black.  I hit reset again 
and watched it boot up this time, and I don't remember if it got to the Windows logo 
screen, but either immediately before or after that screen, it just went black and 
did nothing.

I tried to do a repair with my Windows CD, but after I would specify what Windows 
instance I wanted to repair (I only have one but it asked anyway) I would get an 
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL BSOD.  After googling that for a while, it looked like it 
might be my RAM that was messed up, so I downloaded the Ultimate Boot CD, booted 
into the Windows environment on the CD, and ran a RAM test for 36 hours, which came 
back with a clean bill of health.

So I restarted my computer again and walked away, and when I came back after a while, 
Windows was miraculously back up again.  However, the computer's CPU usage is stuck 
at 100%.  I have used process explorer to check things out, and it looks like Explorer.exe 
is taking up about 35-45% of the CPU, and then System.exe takes up whatever is remaining. 
 I have checked out all of the subprocesses of System.exe and all of them are in 
the System32 folder and none seem to be suspicious.

I have disconnected every peripheral on my computer, including my video card, sound 
card, all cd drives, and my 2 extra hard drives that were used for data storage.

I did not have any anti-virus software or anti-spyware software because the computer 
is only a month or two old and I was just being lazy getting around to it.  I built 
the computer myself, and up until it froze, I never had any problems with it.

So here's a quick rundown of what i've tried and some of my thoughts:

- I have tried to do a Windows Restore and roll back to before this happened, but 
that didn't help.
- The system becomes slow on boot up when I see the Window Logo screen with the green 
progress bar below.
- It is completely unusable.  It takes a minute or two just to get the start menu 
to show up after clicking on it.  It is extremely, extremely slow.
- The lowest i've seen the CPU drop down to is 93%, but it's almost always stuck 
at 100%, even when in safe mode.
- I have run a scan on the hard drive, which did not return any errors.
- I have 2 Gigs of RAM and I have a RAM monitoring program that tells me that I have 
plenty of RAM free, so I don't think that's part of the problem.
- I have opened the computer and checked and double checked every single connection 
to make sure everything is plugged in properly and securely.
- I have not run HJT, but will get around to it soon (Copying a file over from a 
thumb drive takes about a half hour when it's all said and done.)
- I have tried booting up with Last Known Good Configuration to no avail.
- When I boot up into the mini Windows Environment that is on the Universal Boot 
CD that I made (bcd4win.com), it still runs extremely slow and the CPU is still stuck 
at 100%.
- I have checked the temperature of my CPU and I don't remember what it is but I 
do remember googling around and seeing that it was in a normal range, so I don't 
believe heat is an issue.  Plus, I have a huge fan on it.

I am completely out of ideas.  I could try to format my hard drive, but I don't want 
to lose everything and i'm afraid that it won't solve anything anyway.

I think my next step is going to be disconnecting my hard drive, plugging in one 
of my other hard drives that are used strictly for data, and try to install Windows 
on one of those and see how the system responds.


Does anyone have any clue as to what might be wrong?  I have looked all over the 
web and none of the suggestions I have seen seem to help me.  PLEASE let me know 
if you have any ideas, this is the most frustrating problem!!

Thanks!

• Reply or follow-up to this message

• Search this forum
• Start a new thread on a different subject

• Report abuse of the forum