CPU usage hovering beteen 80 - 95% when idle

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A friend gave me their MacBook Pro using Bootcamp to run Windows XP Pro. For all intended purposes this laptop is a Windows machine and boots straight in to XP when you power it up.

When I check process manager I can see that the most offending tasks are
System (around 35% usage)
Explorer.exe (around 20% usage) using about 25MB of RAM
Skype.exe (around 10%)
SkypePM.exe (around 15%)

When I kill the last 3, CPU utilization just drops to about 78%. There are no shady looking processes running. I have also installed AVG 8 Free on it and performed a complete scan. All it found were 3 Adware Generic.* type spyware, which were attributed to Daemon Tools and MediaFACE (some graphics app). I thought to myself that if Daemon tools was flaky then the drive emulation stuff could drive explorer.exe haywire so I disabled the virutal drive and uninstalled Daemon tools. I also read that if your hard disk partitions are heavily fragmented that can cause problems also. So with about 15% of the disk free I went to defrag but there were problems, so I had to perform a chkdsk during windows boot (after requesting in safe mode) which deleted two indexes. Then when I got a back in to windows normally I was able to run Defrag on my OS partition (there is just one partition btw). So now the partition is defragmented and I still haven't gained any performance.

So in summary, CPU usage hovering around 90%, did AVG full scan, uninstalled anything remotely offending, did check disk and defrag on C: drive (partition). CPU is still pretty much maxed.

Any ideas, this is driving me mad. This apparently only started happening recently, as my friend moved in to a new house and their only chance of access net at the time was via vodafone wireless. That apparently worked for a few days and then this happend (about 2 weeks ago). All vodafone wireless stuff has been completely removed from laptop also, so it is not connected to any network. Also the vast majority of their files (music/video/etc) are under MyDocuments. The desktop is clutter free with about 5 or 6 icons, no heavy files, etc.

PaddyTheNth

So basically you've got high CPU usage but none of the processes own up to using it? (btw if you kill explorer.exe it'll just restart itself)

Download Process Explorer and see if that provides any more info - it gives a much better view into system activity...if you sort by CPU it should identify what is using the resources. If it doesn't a repair install may be your only option.

edit: try disabling windows update and then restarting, I've heard that there's a bug related to it on very rare installs.

peterk19

have u upgraded any drivers as i had this problem recently with a server build and it turned out the network drivers were causing the problem

Overheal

none of the svchosts are flaring up?

Meanwhile perform a file backup and be prepared to reformat the machine; thats what it may come down to.