Windows Service Pack 3 eats 45% of CPU power...

[petal]

I'm experiencing a very strange problem.
My computer runs fine with SP2, but the second I install SP3 I experience that 45% of my available CPU power is being used by something in my system. I know this because the system becomes laggy and the graf under the task manager shows this CPU consumption, but when I look under processes everything looks ok. The CPU-hungry process does not show.

I then reinstalled everything and everything looked fine until I installed SP3 then the problem reoccured.

Then I contacted Microsoft and presented them with the situation, and they suggested that I reinstalled Windows and if the the problem persisted I prolly had a hardware compability issue.

Have any of you guys experienced this problem?

My system:
CPU: AMD Athlon64 3500 (S939)
MOBO: MSI K8N-NEO2-Platinum/54, nForce3
GFX: HSI ATI Radeon HD 3850 AGP
3 GB Corsair
2 x Creamware pro cards, 1 x Creamware Electra

Thomas

[Fede]

Quite strange, one hungry process should be visible. Try with "process explorer" from MS-Sysinternals, maybe you will see some more info.
The situation you describe seems a virus/rootkit like activity, are you sure the media you use are virus free?

cheers
Fede

[petal]

Thx.

Well, I only experience the problem when I install SP3 if I de-install it and roll back to SP2 the problem dissapears.
I'm confident that the system is virusfree. I reinstalled windows without being connected to the internet until SP2 and AVG antivirus was installed.

Thomas

[petal]

Trouble is that the CPU hog doesn't show it self - I have no way of finding it unless of course the suggested software in this thread will tell me more than task manager.

[Fede]

Compatibility issues have been reported with sp3 and AMD processors (http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/ ... d-machines) , but that doesn't seem your problem.

You could do this way:

- Install sp2
- Install sp3
- Install drivers one by one restarting for each

This way you should be able to isolate the faulty driver.
Any way, any buggy peripheral can be uninstalled (not deactivated! I mean "uninstalled") from Device Manager at any time.

Fede

[fidox]

what about services, which are running, any new service in sp3 ?

[next to nothing]

just a suggestion; did you update the motherboard drivers?

[petal]

I'm using the newest NForce3 (version 5.11) drivers available available, but they are a few years old. No updates have been made since november 2, 2005.
It might indeed be where my problem is, but I havn't been able to identify it yet though.
I know that other people here at PlanetZ is using this chipset, it was a safe bet back then, it would be interesting to hear about their experience with Service Pack 3.

Thomas

[valis]

Does that nforce3 have the onboard firewall (integrated into the motherboard)? If so try disabling it and using a home router in combination with software like Comodo.

[valis]

Service Pack3 changes the windows security model a bit and Nvidia's onboard firewall has been known to cause issues with other things as well, so it came to mind.

You'll notice you now get the prompt "are you sure you want to open this file" or etc in Xp32 now, it's because although UAC isn't present in the Vista-obvious form the triggers are still occuring in the OS and triggering a prompt, this is part of the security model change.

It may well be somethign else though, just has to be tracked down. Though as long as a system gets critical patches I'm not sure Sp3 is a necessity. I use it for speed gains in certain OS subystems (compiled under Intel's newer compiler) among other things. Memory bandwidth improved and disk throughput in AHCI mode showed noticeable gains (enough so that I finally re-enabled AHCI in Xp).

[petal]

I finally got around to reinstalling SP3 and run Process Explorer. I'm getting a little bit closer, although not close enough.
Process Explorer tells me that it is "Hardware Interrupts" that is consuming the CPU when the computer is runnin "idle".
Not much info is available on this. Under PID it ways n/a.

So what I need now is a tool or instructions on how to dive into which interrupts is causing the problem.

Any suggestions as how to get this info?

cheers!
Thomas

[valis]

Hardware interrupts means it's a device driver. Did you check to make sure the nvidia 'integrated firewall' is disabled? It's buggy and not worth having even if it isn't the primary problem here.

Once that's done the trick would be to disable devices until the cpu usage drops, telling you which device driver was the problem (ie, do this one by one and watch cpu usage. Do it after reboot if necessary (pulling the device etc.)

[cannonball]

hi
i have the same motherboard with the last bios 1D, and the 5,11 nvidia driver,
i have switched from windows xphome sp2 , to windows xppro sp3,
and i have changed the cpu from amd64 3500 1core to opteron180 2 2core,
33 dsp, 2 scope and one luna,
3 ultradma 133 HD (1 for SYstem 1 for samples 1 for recordingmixing )
1 giga Ram,
the video card is agp nforce fx4400
1 external usb cd dvd
2 external usb HD for back up
1 usb printer

i haven't reinstalled anything, and the DAW work much better than before and is more
stable,
i have bought the opteron 180 used on ebay, and i think is a great update
for the MSI neo2 Platinum motherboard.
Ciao
Alessandro

[petal]

Tried to solve my problem for a few hours again today - no luck.

My bios is updated.
I'm running the newest mobo-drivers
I'm not running the Nvidea friewall thing.
I've tried to disable all possible devices, but it didn't help.
I dicovered one wierd problem though, when I try to disable the "NVIDIA nForce Networking Controller" my computer reboots. any one have any ideas why this might be?

I'm at a point where I'm about to give up on this and just never ever install SP3. In my eyes it simply doesn't work. I've litterally spent days trying to solve this, and it is begining to make sense to ask the question, how much do I really need SP3?

[valis]

You don't need sp3 for starters. It does bring some newer code to Xp (including a newer kernel that includes considerably better support for core & core2 architecture cpus, as well as a host of Xp subsystems recompiled under Intel's 9-series compiler). It also brings some annoyances (more networking restrictions under a domain controller, UAC-style 'always ask for this filetype' prompts, more restrictive sharing & moving some services to different account credentials, etc)

However it still seems like you might be having an Nforce (3?) specific issue, assuming you checked all your parallel IDE ports to insure they're in DMA mode, you might want to try the Nforce subsection in the nvidia forums and see if searching and/or asking for help there gives any results.

If it were me I would probably use 2 different Xp installs while sorting this out. Xp32 with sp2 for 'work' and a separate 'testing' install of Xp with sp3, create an image once you have it installed and updated (so you can step back if you mess things up) and then start troubleshooting that install in your spare time until you figure out the conflict. Once you do, you can simply wipe that partition out and go apply sp3 to your 'primary' Xp installation, fixing the issue (hopefully). Probably a good idea to make a backup image before you do this as well...

Or alternatively try slipstreaming sp3 into xp to create a custom install cd, and see if that avoids the issue (ie, for one of your 'test' installs).

[petal]

Hi Valis and everybody else who have contributed input to my problem here - thank you, it is much appreciated!
I don't have time to look deeper into this problem before next week, I will get back to you with rapports about my little adventure here.

Cheers,
Thomas

[dradisf]

i agree with this theory, cause i just reinstalled windows sp3 to a sp2 version and my cpu was drastically lowered

[valis]

Well for what it's worth I have 4 of my 5 machines here running Xp32 sp3 (the 5th runs the Debian linux server distribution). On the oldest one (dual p4-era Prestonia Xeon box) I saw little change in cpu usage while on the 3 newer ones (core/core2 cpu's) I can see a slight performance improvement in most things. The only thing that got more sluggish was network file operations. But this was done to bring Xp in line with the new security model & really doesn't indicate a change in actual performance, just the way that the system caches network file operations is now a bit more 'apparent' (not as bad as Vista pre-sp1 though). I see no background hardware or software tasks using excessive cpu, and if you see interrupt requests eating cpu then this indicates a driver issue.

Again you don't NEED sp3, but if you want to run it do some troubleshooting when you see issues to identify the conflict or failing hardware/software.

[braincell]

I'm getting great flow with SP3.

[petal]

On microsofts recommendation I just reinstalled windows (again). They were full of confidence that this would cure more problem.
I only installed Windows SP1 and on top of that SP3. Alas, the problem remains. Even on my machine where nothing but Microsoft's own code is installed.
One interesting point for us Scope-lovers is that I even removed my three scope cards to see if they somehow were the cause of the problem, fortunately they were not. Even after I had removed them from my system the problem remained.

I give up - I'm not gonna install SP3. From now on I'm only gonna run Windows SP2.

Thanks for all the help you've given me - It was much appreciated!
Thomas