Wierd Problem

[therealeu]

Hi everyone,
I'm new to this and am not a technical wizard, but I know enough that I put this computer together and it's been working very well for a while, until 3 days ago.
I have a 2 Gig Intel Celeron processor, (not sure what the motherboard is called) but the box says Intel 865 PE Max 2, or Dynasty?
XP, 512 RAM, Radeon 9000 graphics card and a cable modem. Hopefully that's enough (other than normal programs I have Norton and ZoneAlarm, also KazaaLite.) Everything was cool until a couple days ago when everything started going extremely slow. Then, when I went to go online I found all my favorites had been erased. I typed in a website and when I tried to put it in my favorites it asked me if I wanted to format C:?!? Also, Zone Alarm forgot about all the program rights and had to ask me whenever a program wanted to go online.
So, trying to figure it out I hit Ctrl,Alt,Del and under the processes tab saw that some program was taking up 99 % of the CPU. So, I searched out that program and found it was part of ZoneAlarm. Thinking I could stop it I uninstalled ZA, yet everything stayed slow. I went to the task manager again and saw that now the system idle process was taking 99% of the CPU. Though, I can still play Warcraft, it takes a while to start up, but once it's going it runs fine. Then I became to confused to continue.
My only thoughts were that my processor is blown, yet some things run a little slow but fine. Clicking to get online takes a while, but once it's up it's ok. Virus? Norton has updated itself a couple times recently. I'm almost ready to go buy a new processor, but figured this coule be a problem that experts would easily know how to fix. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[John Prophet]

Welcome to the forum!

I seriously doubt its the processor. Sounds more like a virus, lol.

try going to www.antivirus.com and doing the free scan.


and/or boot from windows xp cd and do the "repair" option for an install...not the first "repair" option (thats only the recovery console) but let it search for windows installations on your drive and it'll find your XP install..then choose to repair that install.


JP

[therealeu]

thanks for the quick reply.. do I need to back up all my stuff before doing a repair?

[John Prophet]

nope, it doesnt overwrite personal stuff.

another thing you might try first is just doing a "system restore" to a time before the problem started.

Also, does it act the same in safe mode??

[therealeu]

haha.. I went to www.antivirus.com and it said I had some sort of trojan virus and is now checking the rest of my CPU. Thanks a lot Mr. Prophet. I am now a fan of this website and will return. Haven't tried safe mode, but hopefully won't have to.

[John Prophet]

safe mode is just a limited mode where it just loads basic stuff, its used to troubleshoot issues...for instance if it boots fine into safe mode but not regular mode then that gives you a good headstart to finding the problem.

But yeah, when comps start giving all kinds of weird behavior the first thing u should think is "virus".

You say you have norton? Was it updated?

ahhh, I just noticed kazaa lite....hehe..can you say "virus city"....lol....

when you see the name of the trojan you can go to www.symantec.com and look it up and see what their removal instructions are.

JP

[kranich]

Don’t worry about the system idle process taking up 99% because that is exactly what it is supposed to do. Let me explain. The process was created to keep the processor busy. It runs at the lowest priority, and so will get cycles when nothing else is requesting CPU attention. As you open apps or run services the number drops.

I would run MSCONFIG and select the “diagnostic “ option. Then go to task manager and open up many apps one at the time to see if any single app is taking up 100% of CPU.

If you find that none are …well… I hate to say it dude but bad drivers cause this sort of thing and usually the only way to isolate it is to do a clean install. My advice at that point would be to save what you can and do a clean install.