Churning

[chazza]

My computer sits and churns constantly, even when there is nothing open, and while it is churning away, if I try to open anything, it is very slow. It is a work computer and only about a year old so doesn't need upgrading.

On the general tab of the system properties it says:
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU
6400 @2.13GHz
2.13GHz, 0.97 GB of RAM

Any ideas what is wrong with it or how I can get this churning to stop?

[rnbowar]

My experience with churning has always lead to a fan. In the past it has been as easy as cleaning them with some canned air (make sure you turn off your computer first). I also have had fans go bad where I had to replace them. Some may say it is your hard drive too but I have never had one churn.

[chazza]

No this is definitely not the fan - it is coming from inside the computer and I would say it is the hard drive, it sounds like it is working really hard to do something but cannot manage it. It does this for maybe 2-3 hours every morning (so constantly might have been an exaggeration) and then stops and might start again later on

[pug100]

Virus Checker? if one of these is installed it will do this at least once a day at a certain time,. It shold operate in the background and not affect preformance though.
You could always try the task manager to see what's running ctrl atl & delete and choose task manager will show which apps are running ans well as processes and CPU usage

[chazza]

We use Realtime but have been using it for years and only now the churning has really started.

When i open task mgr, there are no applications running and loads of processes, although I don't know which ones it is safe to stop without messing up the machine!

[fo3nix]

In the processes list, there's another column showing the CPU time (1-100%)... click the column title a few times to order that column, and get back to us with the processes that are using lots of CPU time (the highest numbers).

Maybe one or two are at 99 or so?