My brother has been having problems with his computer almost since day one. It's custom-built, and although I didn't build it myself, the guy who did build it really knows what he's doing. It is safe to assume the hardware components are compatible with one another and the OS (W2K). Nothing is overclocked, and other than what I'm about to describe, the system is stable.

After two years of fighting niggling little issues that have just seemed like random stability problems, the kind you get from a mildly-corrupted Windows installation, it's beginning to seem as though MS Word may actually be the culprit. We're finding that his CPU usage spikes to 50%, 80%, 90%, or higher, when Word is being used. This compared to the 5% or less CPU usage when other programs, including other Office apps, are being used. Furthermore, Word won't release that CPU until the Word window is explicitly minimized.

Results of this high CPU usage vary. One common problem is for the computer to totally lock up, requiring a restart. Other times it will slow down very badly, but will free up as soon as he's able to close Word (which can take some time when the computer will hardly respond). Another common thing is for the BIOS to start chirping the "overheated CPU" warning for a few seconds.

Computer has a P4 2.8 Ghz CPU and 1GB RAM. Plenty high-spec to handle Word without problems.

I know the obvious answer here is to try uninstalling and reinstalling Word and see if that helps. But before doing that, I thought I'd ask if there was anything else to check up on. I hate to start fragmenting the hard drive with a bunch of uninstall/reinstalls unless there's some hope for success...

Thanks for any ideas,

Matthew
Back to top

Sounds like windows for sure.

Check ram
Here's my guesses, from some similar experiences: cheap memory, or mismatched memory, or defective memory. Run memtest to see if it's physically bad. Takes a few hours to loop through. Memtest is available on the ultimate boot cd, and as an advanced grub option on kanotix livecd [shameless plug], and as a standalone disk utility cdrom.

Memtest will probably not detect the cheap or mismatched memory errors, thought it might if you are lucky. Moral: don't ever buy cheap or mismatched memory for modern systems.

Slightly corrupted memory can, if I understand it right, end up slightly corrupting the software that resides in it most often. In my case, it was windows explorer that got corrupted.

If it only happens on ms word, that's my guess. So word is corrupted, can't be fixed probably, and needs to be reinstalled. That's not a big deal really, just defrag the drive afterwards. Remember to reboot after uninstalling word, then reinstall it.

Problem with just uninstalling it though is you won't know why it got corrupted. That's something you want to figure out before messing with it more. Could also be hard disk damage, you want to check that too, also can be done using ultimate boot cd disk test utilities.

Test the hard drive for errors
If some of the physical word program data got corrupted, it's likely that word will act badly, as it is. So check the disk too. If it's fat32 it's even more likely that some data got corrupted and the corruption was not detected. Never use a non-journalled file system like fat32 or ext2 for anything important.

Do not use the native windows disk check utility, use the manufactor one if you can, the one you have to boot into. Some sata drives can't be tested this way, but usually the ibm disk test utility will check those ok. As a last resort, use chkdisk on windows.

cpu should not be overheating no matter what
While not directly linked, the overheated cpu is a bad sign, and suggests strongly that a poor quality heatsink cooling fan was used to build the box. Even at long stretches of 100% cpu useage my box rarely goes over 5 or 6 degrees C over ambient mobo temp. That's using a nice thermaltake copper heatsink with 80 mm fan, running very slow, 2000 rpm or less.

However, that's the result of the problem you're talking about, not the cause of it, but it's worth fixing that one too by putting on a better heatsink. I used to run the stock AMD aluminum heatsinks, but after a while I got tired of the 10-12 over ambient cpu heat, and the incredibly noisy 5500 + rpm stock cpu fans. Switched to silent and copper and temp drops, dbs drop, it's all good again.

Also make sure the bios warning temp is not set too low. 60 C is safe I believe, with a warning at maybe 55 or so.

As windows problems go, that one sounds pretty mild.
Back to top

The RAM and hard drives have been checked the way you suggested (I forgot to mention that before) and came out good. All the components are high quality; the RAM was high-end Kingston and it is matched. As I said, it passed Memtest fine, but I've heard there are some errors that Memtest won't pick up. It might be worth replacing the RAM to see if that helps.

For now, I've uninstalled Word, restarted, and am waiting on the drives to defrag (emptied Recycle Bin first). Then I'll restart again and reinstall Word. Hopefully that will fix the problem.

Thanks for the tips on the CPU. I thought it was overheating because of extended periods of unusually-high use, caused by Word's problems. If it shouldn't overheat under any circumstances, then we have a problem. I opened the case to check on the heatsink, and the thing is a massive Intel unit with a plenty big fan. I doubt it's the problem. However, the heatsink was packed with dust between the fins, which I should have thought to check for, having dealt with that before. I cleaned it out and we'll see if that fixes the overheating problems. I also found out this morning that the overheating has only been happening recently, lending further credibility to the dust explanation.

One thing that concerns me is that the BIOS settings for the CPU temperature are to warn at 70C, and shut down at 75C. That's quite a bit higher than your recommended 55-60C. I'll search around and see if I can find the safe operating temperature for this CPU. Being Intel, I would think it should run much cooler than it is.



Heh heh, yes, it could be a lot worse. I've lost track of the number of times I've had to reformat a Windows machine and start over with a clean install. Unfortunately, my brother requires Windows for a lot of the programs he needs to run, such as PhotoShop, Quark, Acrobat, etc. I don't think WINE runs all of those with full functionality, so unfortunately I doubt Linux is an option for now.
Back to top

That's the good thing about a good guy building the box for you, you can eliminate a whole bunch of common errors and mistakes from your list of suspected causes.

I would assume the drives and memory are not the issue, I just mentioned those in case he had taken a shortcut, but he didn't, which is always nice to see.

Yes, the dust will cause the cpu to overheat, simple logic, fan blows air down over cooling fins, removes heat, dust builds, fan blows air over dust layer, cooling fins are not cooled, cpu heats up. Coming up to 70 degrees though is getting really hot, way too hot I think. Check again how it is after the cleaning.

Intels tend to run hotter than amds so I don't want to say for sure it's too hot, but I can tell you internally in intel it was a big debate for a year or two whether or not to go for raw megahertz at the cost of heat and power. As you can see from the new processor lines, core duo etc, the right side is now back in charge, the ridiculously fast cpus they put out over the last 2 years were an error, that mistake won't happen again, it cost intel a big chunk of their market share.

But I can tell you for sure, having run the same cpu with large copper and large aluminum heatsink, and with a 60 mm fan on aluminum at 5500 rpm, and an 80 mm on copper at about 2000 rpm, there is literally a difference of roughly on average 12 degrees C between those two setups. The copper unit also uses liquid heat compound goo, whereas the stock units use those heat tape things, which are not nearly as affective. Artic silver is of course the best, but it's much harder to apply, and if you make a mistake you fry your cpu, since it's metallic and conducts. So I stick with the ok goo, which is easy to apply.

Re linux, with those software requirements, you have to stick to windows unfortunately. While photoshop runs ok in wine/ linux, at least older versions, I want to emphasize the 'ok', it's not like native.

An interesting option however is to run vmware in linux then run the windows inside that. Takes a bit of a hit in terms of efficiency, but with enough ram it's ok. But there's not much point in that to me, if windows software is the main requirement, then running windows is probably still the way to go for now.
Back to top