CPUs running at 100% (Hardy Heron, Dell XPS M1330)

[J]

On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 09:36, Quin Wills <quin.wills at simugen-global.com> wrote:

> I should probably have mentioned that I did 'top' and found that just
> running Firefox takes ~12% when opened to my Gmail, which I figured as
> probably fine-ish (thanks for confirming). I was initially worried that this
> might be a Firefox thing and re-installed it too. But no luck. And now of
> course, it's happening with any just about anything. Opening up Openoffice,
> a PDF and Firefox gets dangerous... but not consistently though. I'd say
> (very roughly) about 1 in 3 times the CPU runs away and then freezes my
> machine.

What you haven't said, yet, is have you tried looking at any other causes??

Yes, your problem could be a CPU.  Or it could be a kernel update.

But before you go down that dark path, you need to look at other
things first.  You said you've had this system for a year or so... are
you sure the fans are working and it's not over-heating?  Are you sure
the case isn't full of dust, fur, or other things that shouldn't be in
there?

Have you tried running memtest86 to test the RAM?  So far, all the
things you mention sound a lot like over-heating or bad memory.

Unfortunately, your problem is a lot like the medical diagnosis "I
feel bad".  It could be caused by a LOT of different things, and your
best bet is to eliminate the most common things first.

0:  Boot from a live CD or USB stick.  If you run the live environment
that way, do you still see high usage?
1:  Dirty computer.  Clean it out.
2:  Dead cooling fans.  Replace them.
3:  Bad RAM: test it and replace as necessary
4:  at the very least, reseat your ram.
5:  Other things??

You said this is a laptop, and if it's only a year old, I very
strongly doubt the processor is bad.  It COULD be bad, but if your
processor was so bad off in the first place that it would start
failing after a year, you would have seen problems long before now.

Cheers
Jeff