Been having this trouble a while and nobody has solved it for me.

Running XP, used to be fine but about a year ago certain programs (kids games) started "stuttering" or hesitating. I thought it was a new game we had, but older games we never had issues with before started doing it too.

The problem appears to be that for no reason I can find, my CPU usage balloons to 100% and just brings everything to a halt for 10 seconds or so. When a starting a new game it will run a minute or two, then problem starts occuring every 45-60 seconds. Since then I've noticed that it also happens just cruising the web, etc.

What I've tried so far:

1) reformatted hard drive and reloaded XP
2) tried playing these games with screen saver off
3) Tired playing with the network cable unplugged (thinking an internet program was running in the background
4) Tried running in safe mode to limit what programs were in use behind the scenes

Ideas?

Sign me

Frustrated! the kids are driving me crazy because none of their games will run right anymore.

Can you identify the source of the usage? Watch the processes tab on the Task Manager.

also: look in your event viewer: rt. click My Computer then click Manage then Event Viewer.
open the system as well as the application tabs & look for X errors. click error line for details. post back the source & event id especially of errors that seem to coincide with a surge.

Also what is your computer? Your Processor? Your Graphics Card? Your DirectX version? Your monitor? Refresh rate?

Antivirus? Firewall?

I am using Norton, but didn't get that until after the trouble started. No firewall and I have tried these games with "everything" turned off that I knew how to turn off.

Running a Compaq 5430US, Pent. 4 processor 1.8ghz
512MB memory
nVidia GeForce2 MX graphics card
Have done upgrades for DirectX, Video Drivers, etc.

I'll try the event viewer thing and let you know what it says.

Task Manager is very hard to see a probelm area ... especially since I'm not sure what should be running.

Thx for the response!!

Event Manager had no errors that matched up even close to when the problem occured this afternoon.

On my processes in the task manager window .... largest file is CCAPP.exe. What is that puppy? Other 2 largest are iexplorer.exe and svchost.exe. but I'm not having the trouble right this minute so this type screen (little graphics I guess) doesn't generate the problem.

ccapp is norton.
iexplorer is I.E.
svchost is generic

what is your system idle when you are idle?

System says - Cpu 00 Memory usage 236K

System idle process say CPU 97 or 98 Memory usage 16K

That's very well & good!

Try a game with the task manager on top & just try to see if you can see a process that surges.

Or in Pro (dont know home) go to admin tools & performance:
performance logs & alerts:
where you can initiate a log of activity & then play your game.

Can you open taskmanager and say what process is causing it?as jepree said

to be honest ... when a game is running there are many things happening on that screen ... guess my old eyes are not sharp enough to pick up on what the culprit might be. I'll try that again though.

Of course some of those things have to increase in the course of the game, right? How will I know what the troublemaker looks like?

I'll post again after running a game and checking what's happening exactly.

Thx to you both

have someone else play while you watch

.........................

also try the log file in admin tools.