Hover the cursor over the Task Manager icon in your system tray to see the current CPU usage in a pop-up window. The Performance tab shows your CPU usage. The CPU column shows the available CPU cycles that each process is running. To see your running programs and subroutines. Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete (in Windows 2000, click Task Manager In Windows XP and 2000, the Task Manager can show you what's chewing up CPU cycles. If the processor overload occurs intermittently, note what you're doing each time the system slows down: the programs you're running, the Web sites you visited that day, and so on. Windows 2000 lacks this utility for this OS, download Startup Control Panel, Mike Lin's free alternative.

Tab, uncheck suspicious options one at a time, and reboot until the problem stops. If your system's CPU spike is constant, the software at fault probably loads when Windows boots. More likely, however, is an unintended problem with an honest program. If virus and spyware scans don't find the problem, it may be due to a malware program that's too new to be caught. Set your antivirus program to check for updates and do a full scan automatically at least once a week. They're free, so why not download and use both of them? Next, update your antivirus definitions and run a full virus scan. Scan your system regularly with a good spy-catching program such as Lavasoft's Ad-Aware or Patrick M. The most obvious culprit is a virus, spyware, or some other malicious software. But if they keep coming back or don't go away, you have to find out what's wrong and fix it. If the CPU spikes happen rarely and correct themselves quickly, don't worry about it. Any ideas on what happened and what to do about it?Īn overloaded CPU can make a PC unbearably slow. Two days ago my CPU usage jumped to 100 percent, slowing the computer beyond use. I recently received the following question from April Turkett of Morristown, Tennessee.

Windows monitor cpu spikes