unusually high cpu usage

azezil

I was just writeing an email and all of a sudden the cpu went mad!

NT4 sp6a, went into task manager shut down alota stuff but still the usage kept jumpin from 65% - 100%.
I restarted the machine n appears fine now but its not the first time!

Its a dell optiplex gx110, p3 800mhz so it really shouldn't be happening.

I thought it might be someone runing something from my comp over the lan so i stoped shareing my hd but no change...

Anyone come accross this or know why it happens?

p.s. antivirus software is updated regularly, so i douth its a virus...

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"just because you're not paraniod, doesn't mean they're not after you!"

Canaboid

Could be your AV software scanning the H/D.
In task manager go to processes and sort by cpu. Find out what process is hogging your resources.

_CreeD_

Outlook Express 5 used to do that all the time on me on NT4. I'd be reading away and then it would just grab 99% of the CPU time and stay there until I shut down the process. It seems fine on Win2k.

po0k

Maybe some sort of caching thing? Is the NT4 version of Outlook (assuming there is a different on) more aggressive with resource hounding then the Win9x/Win2k versions?(again assuming there are differences)

Hobbes

Is it workstation or server?

What is the task taking up the memory? Open up task manager and sort by CPU.