Help Wanted (A message from our sponsors)
To all of my computer-fixy friends, I need help.
With no warning, my beloved computer of 6 years, Xavier, has become sick. I came home on Thanksgiving and discovered that he was not doing well, despite the fact that he and I spent hours the night before in Interweb land with no incident. Now, whenever I start a web browser, be it Firefox or IE, the CPU usage spikes to 100%. After looking through the process list in the task manager, it is not the browser itself doing this, it's the System process. Given 30 seconds, it will go back to normal levels, but spikes again when I load a new page, click a link, or even switch tabs. This means that anytime I try and do anything, it takes forever, making browsing damn near impossible.
I thought it was some form of malware, so I ran SpyBot. SpyBot only found a couple of things and when removed, didn't fix the problem. I ran a full system virus scan which turned up nothing, I even defragmented my hard drive with no effect. I installed one program the Sunday before symptoms started, Winamp, and nothing else for at least a few weeks before that.
The only clue I have is that on Thanksgiving my brother tells me we had a flicker in the power. Not even long enough to reset the clocks, but enough to restart Xavier. He has a surge protector, and still works from an electrical standpoint, but it's the only thing out of the ordinary that happened.
If anyone thinks they know what's wrong with Xavier would like to come over and look at him, I would love you forever, and feed you.
I miss my Xavier, even though he's old, and there are a lot of faster, younger boys on the market, they're not mine. Xavier has been good to me, and I'm not quite willing to put him out to the land of file server quite yet. Please help me to get him back in working order. Think of the gigabytes, do it for them.
Thanks for your time.
This message sponsored by the Save Xavier foundation, an affiliate of the "Just because it's old doesn't mean I should get rid of it" Coalition and partnered with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Workstations.
With no warning, my beloved computer of 6 years, Xavier, has become sick. I came home on Thanksgiving and discovered that he was not doing well, despite the fact that he and I spent hours the night before in Interweb land with no incident. Now, whenever I start a web browser, be it Firefox or IE, the CPU usage spikes to 100%. After looking through the process list in the task manager, it is not the browser itself doing this, it's the System process. Given 30 seconds, it will go back to normal levels, but spikes again when I load a new page, click a link, or even switch tabs. This means that anytime I try and do anything, it takes forever, making browsing damn near impossible.
I thought it was some form of malware, so I ran SpyBot. SpyBot only found a couple of things and when removed, didn't fix the problem. I ran a full system virus scan which turned up nothing, I even defragmented my hard drive with no effect. I installed one program the Sunday before symptoms started, Winamp, and nothing else for at least a few weeks before that.
The only clue I have is that on Thanksgiving my brother tells me we had a flicker in the power. Not even long enough to reset the clocks, but enough to restart Xavier. He has a surge protector, and still works from an electrical standpoint, but it's the only thing out of the ordinary that happened.
If anyone thinks they know what's wrong with Xavier would like to come over and look at him, I would love you forever, and feed you.
I miss my Xavier, even though he's old, and there are a lot of faster, younger boys on the market, they're not mine. Xavier has been good to me, and I'm not quite willing to put him out to the land of file server quite yet. Please help me to get him back in working order. Think of the gigabytes, do it for them.
Thanks for your time.
This message sponsored by the Save Xavier foundation, an affiliate of the "Just because it's old doesn't mean I should get rid of it" Coalition and partnered with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Workstations.