CPU hike along with constant refeshing

[poochyena]

so, i made a video, it was a huge file, so i converted the video using a video converter that i like, well, it seems like it was gonna take a minute, so i decided to do my homework, i go to bring up a website with a really nice calculator(been using the site for months, same with my video converter) and about 2 minutes later, the page is constantly, i guess, trying to refresh, so i clicked out of it, going to my youtube tab, and it does the same thing, so i brought up task manager... and this is what it looked like



it lasted for about 30 seconds to 1 minute, everything seemed normal, normal CPU is usually around 20% while converting a video and having firefox up

oh, and this happened once before a few weeks ago
no virus on my computer either, did a full system scan using norton anti-virus

any idea what happened?


hmm, interesting, Norton says that it was the video converter using up most of the CPU, but last time it happened, i didn't have the video converter up

[cphite]

Video converter seems like a likely suspect... but unfortunately without knowing what you have installed on your computer and what was actually running at these times, it's really not possible to give you an answer.

Next time it happens, click on the "Processes" tab of Task Manager, make sure "Show Processes from All Users" is selected, and then sort by CPU. That'll at least tell you what process(s) are taking up so much.

As an aside, if you see something you don't recognize taking up a lot of resources, consider installing something like MalwareBytes and running a scan with that. No virus scanner is perfect - and if the one you're running missed something being installed on your machine, chances are fair that it'll also miss it when you run a full scan.

[poochyena]

i actually opened up a screen recorder and recorded some both times, but it started up kinda slow, and didn't start recording while it was using up over 60% of my CPU, but it did record while my CPU was up higher than normal, and its weird, Norton says the video converter was using alot of CPU(around 50-60% max) but from what i recorded, task manager says the video converter was using 0% of the cpu, and the thing using the most CPU was the screen recorder o.O
from what i recorded the first time, i seen a program called "dllhost.exe" which soon after disappeared, never seen or heard of it before, but its been on my computer for forever apparently o.O
thats the only process that was active that i seen that normally isn't active

oh yea, and one more thing, why does task manager not show all the things using CPU? i added up how much CPU the things were using, and it didn't add up to the total CPU being used, why is that?

* just now realized what "show processes from all users" does o.o Always thought it didn't mean anything to me since this computer only has one user...

[poochyena]

ok, typing a paper for english class, i click "save" then about 5 seconds later, blue screen of death, i didn't even touch my keyboard or anything, all i had up was firefox (youtube, and a wesbite to find synonyms for words), windows media player, and a word document, typing my paper.

my computer hates me x.x (although, it was nice enough to wait till after i saved my paper to crash)

[HungryHobo]

got kinda similar behavior after installing a game which turned out to have starforce copyprotection(damned thing is worse than most viruses).

it had installed some crap drivers which weren't compatible with my version of windows which caused horrible CPU usage as it tried to run.

Did you install anything lately? could check for bad drivers.

[Jorpho]

* just now realized what "show processes from all users" does o.o Always thought it didn't mean anything to me since this computer only has one user...

Some processes that launch at start up run with higher privileges and thus are not visible when you're running as a regular user.