Subject: PC

yes, nothing unusual in task manager. only the programs that were supposed to work and nothing mega big working.

That's strange.

Maybe try Properties of C drive, and the others if you have more, and choose Extra and do error check and defrag. Maybe it shows you the error(s) or broken sectors.

I found a site with many more people having the same problem as you have, maybe here you can find the answer: www.geek.com - CPU usage problem

Also some program like this is mentioned in that forum: http://download.cnet.com - HijackThis (read carefully before using, and/or search for websites to get some more info how to use it the right way:))

seems like that crash during restart messed up your memory or your hard drive or your os.

you could try chkdsk and some software to check out registry + memory diagnostics

if doesnt work try repairing windows using cd or recovery soft(depending on what os you are using)
if doesnt work try taking out cmos battery for 2 minutes.

if doesnt work, well then probably your motherboard is slowly dieing.

or

windows update is messing with you and something is in the middle of update/install

Is your CPU usage high all the time? Check that with the task manager, e.g. leave it open to have the cpu usage shown in a tray icon.

Or is your computer just slow? That's often the hard disk reading without end and slowing down everything.

First you have to find out which component slows you down and then you can go on fixing it. Everything else is just guessing.

cpu usage is high all the time. and it seems, it´s getting worse. today it is between 70-100% all the time.

save all work on memory stick, and re-install your laptop. has happen to me twice and this has worked both times :) (then only put the files you need back on the computer)

If that is the case you should actually be able to find the task that is consuming all the cpu time in the task manager. In case you can't find it iniatially, there should be a button on the lower left side which say's "show processes of all users" or something like this. This would also display system process that might be the problem.

I bet is an HDD problem, try to start your laptop with another HDD and tell us ;)

Do the task manager check that Charles Hill suggested, but click on "show process from all users", and then see again if soemone is using up all the CPU. If you are able to see CPU usage at 90-100%, it means Vista has the info somewhere, but it may not be showing it in the default task manager view.
If it doesn't reveal anything, mmm... OK, I'd have to think about it :P
If it does, it may still be uninformative if it some form of "svchost.exe", which may be many components of the OS/drivers/etc, but also some camouflaged virus (virus would probably do a more efficient use of CPU, though :P)

In my case, there are 2 guys who sometimes screw my CPU, but they are visible in the basic task manager: Dell's webcam central (randomly) and spybot resident protection (always - so I disabled it and just scan the computer when I feel I need to), shown as "teatimer.exe".

EDIT: useless post, I've just seen er1k making the same remark :)

(edited)

windows reinstall. worked well for a day or two. CPU usage jumping from 10 to 100% from time to time now. not too often thank god, but still, not a good sign I guess:/

I have a problem.

Last week when I turned on my computer one morning I heard a high pitched sound coming from it and there was an error message on the screen which told me to restart the computer. Restarted it several times and sometimes the message appered again and sometimes the computer froze. Sometimes the screen was just black.
After several tries the sound disappeared and the computer started. Then I had no problems using it for several hours (10-12h atleast).
I managed to reach the BIOS, but there it froze after a while.

Did this for about 4 days I think. But one morning when I restarted it over and over again it still wouldn't start. Could do it over 20 times and nothing worked.

I opened it up and checked to see if everything was okay inside (had done it a few days before, but did it again just in case). Everything seemed fine.
Put it together again and started it. Good news was that the sound was gone, but the bad news was that nothing else happened. The screen wont even turn on.

At first I feared something was wrong with the harddrive so I tried another one and nothing changed, so I guess that wasn't the problem.
I've changed the graphic card and the problem still exists. I've tried to use one RAM at the time to see if one of them was broken, but the problem is still there no matter which one I use, so I guess that's not the problem either.

My guess is that something is wrong with the motherboard or the CPU, but I'm not sure.

Anyone know what might be wrong?

If you can find an old Power supply unit, try and see if thats the problem.

Zorro to Don Enzo
windows reinstall. worked well for a day or two. CPU usage jumping from 10 to 100% from time to time now. not too often thank god, but still, not a good sign I guess:/

what version of windows? if its vista its the windows indexing thingy. it auto updates every so often and when i had it on old pc it caused major lags for around 5mins when it was running..
i disabled it and everything was fine.. just when you want to search something it takes longer (because its not indexed)
there was a major bug in vista with it anyway...m,aybe caus i only had 2Gb ram either...

but anyway thats my guess for occasional lags.. i found it through task manager - performance - resource manager.

its a more detailed breakdown of processes and services on your computer.. problem was because it was only occasional spikes it was hard to track (because everything lagged when it happened i cudnt open task manager or anything)
either way that resource monitor had a max min or average was high... and i found it because of that

windows 7 it is

but it worked perfectly fine for a month or so.