CPU usage too high?

[tango305]

Okay, so one day I wake up to find my computer slow as heck. I come back and reboot it to find out I'm getting slow boot times, about 5 minutes to get to login from Win XP loading screen. Since then I've run all spyware/malware and virus removal tools, I even have McAfee installed and running, found a bunch of useless viruses...did nothing.
I updated all my drivers and still no luck.
So now I'm totally lost to what's going on! My PC has been acting up for about a week, before I cleaned the viruses out the CPU usage was hitting 50-60%, now it's still getting slow boot times but it's dropped to about 30%.
Still this is too slow, opening browsers, apps etc is way too slow. I can't even play games at all.

Here's my specs:
Intel E8400 CPU
Intel DG35EC Mobo
4 GB Kingston HyperX DDR2 800 ram
450 watt Corsair PSU
Asus EAH4850 TOP 512mb Graphics

Help would be greatly appreciated, I was also encountering BSOD's but that was probably unrelated...and I haven't seen one in about a day. All my temps are fine, I'm not overheating, but I'm so lost...if it's not a virus, what is it that's hogging up all my CPU?

 

[amdfangirl]

well if it doesn't work, nuke it - American proverb

 

[Reynod]

download hyjackthis and see what is going on with hidden processes installed at bootup.

Get process explorer from the MS site and use that to see what is chewing up all of the cpu time.

It could be a lot of things but is often a driver ... I note you said you had reinstalled them ... chipset? graphics? usb?

Good luck.

I tend to do a clean reinstall once things get a bit like this ... often hard to pin it down.

 

[tango305]

Well I already ran process explorer, my step brother did for me anyway. He mentioned that it said something about a hardware interrupt. ATM I am running a chkdsk and it is orphaning tons of files, it's been on for about an hour now, and it said it has replaced some bad clusters. When I get the chance I'll run hijackthis and show you the log of the chkdsk.
Any other suggestions, I've run anti virus programs such as spybot, malwarebytes, spysweeper, combofix, tons more..Killed about a hundred viruses but they were nothing to worry about and it didn't help as I mentioned.
If all else fails I'm fixin' to reinstall XP Pro, but I get the feeling it may be my harddrive?
As for the drivers I updated everything that driveragent said I needed to. Some USB, some IDE controllers, even the audio drivers they are all updated now so that wasn't the problem either.

 

[mike99]

Sounds like failing hard drive. HDTune will show SMARTt data and measure performance. Post your results. You can also download and run drive manufacturers diagnostic. If the drive has to perform lots of retrys it will slow down system as you have described.

Mike

 

[tango305]

Well chkdsk took all nighht...and to no luck never really finished..kept replacing bad clusters. So I figure my hard drive is done for. It's pretty old, about 3 or 4 years so I'll just get a new one soon.
Would you guys suggest any hdd's in particular?

 

[tango305]

I replaced it with a WD 250gb SATA drive.
I'm trying to reinstall and it keeps giving me BSOD's right after it says, "Setup is about to start Windows."
This is the error:

Technical Information

*** STOP: 0x0000007E (0x0000005, 0xF748E0BF, 0xF78DA208, 0xF78D9F08)

pci.sys - Address F748E0BF base at F7487000, Datastamp 367d855c

 

[mike99]

You either need to set SATA I/F to emulate PATA or Legacy IDE, or you need to load SATA driver for your motherboard controller. What OS? Use Memtest86 to test your memory as faulty memory can corrupt data written to HD.

Mike.

 

[tango305]

Tested all the parts, swapped them out and they were good.
But I solved the problem, ran a disc with sp2 on it and it worked.
After the clean reinstall I updated drivers and it seems to work fine now, got all my files I needed from the old bad hdd and I'm good to go...only took all day.
Anyway thanks for the help guys, greatly appreciated. =]