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I've got a 5 year old Dell Dimension running WinXP SP3 that's really chugging along - Process Hacker (and Windows Task Manager) both report abnormally high Interrupt CPU usage. This ranges from 10-70%. I've read some about DMA vs PIO problems - are there other issues that can cause this kind of hardware interrupt spike in CPU usage? Where would one start?

Thanks, JDB

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There are many possibilities. Can you think of any recent changes to the O/S, software, hardware, drivers, patches, settings, or use of the PC in question? Obviously anything that happened around the time you started noticing the spiking CPU use would be the first place to look. What antivirus software is installed? Does it auto-update? Is Windows configured to update itself automatically? – boot13 Aug 13 '10 at 20:45
This is my in-law's computer - so everything's configured for auto-update. It's always (AFAIK) run kinda slow - so I figured maybe a hardware problem, but figured I'd check here first. They did manage to fry their printer's USB port by forcing the plug in upside down - forgot about that. I should try disabling the USB hardware - is that possible? They've had several different A/V programs - I think first was McAffee, but that's been dispatched with and MSE installed. It's the "interrupt" task that has me confused - software shouldn't have anything to do with it, correct? – JDB Aug 16 '10 at 19:04
Is a reinstall out of the question? – Ivo Flipse♦ Dec 15 '10 at 18:46
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See this thread for instructions

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/140263-how-to-get-the-cause-of-high-cpu-usage-by-dpc-interrupt/

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Does this work for WinXP as well as 7? – JDB Aug 16 '10 at 19:00
Hmm I don't know, you might make a post in that forum and ask. The performance toolkit does support XP, so it should work. microsoft.com/downloads/… – Moab Aug 17 '10 at 0:52
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