I have a problem with my computer, would appreciate any hints/ideas. It usually begins not immediately after booting Windows, but at some unpredictable point in time, which doesn't seem to correlate with any specific actions of mine. First sign of a problem is process System starting to consume 25% CPU time steadily. I have a quad-core CPU, so it might be one thread working non-stop. At this point micro-freezes start to occur - screen stops refreshing, but if I have, say, music player running - it continues playing. If I try to do something between the freezes, like open Start menu, it will freeze completely and forever. If I press reset button the PC will shut down and then start cold, as opposed to usual reset behavior (which doesn't include PC shutting down).
I have noticed that full restart upon reset is usual for hardware problems, but I think this problem isn't related to at least motherboard-CPU-RAM-videoadapter. It certainly isn't caused by overheating.
One very important not is that it seems to be related to Windows hosted WLAN network: I have USB Wi-Fi dongle and have configured a hosted network to share cable Internet connection with Wi-Fi devices. I am not 100% certain there's a strong connection, but in 9 or 10 cases when I enabled the network (by executing netsh wlan start hostednetwork
), it did freeze eventually (sometimes within minutes of starting the network, sometimes within hours), and on at least 10 days when I didn't start the network it never froze, no matter how I used the computer).
There are no critical/error entries in the events log that I can suspect as being related, only regular stuff like "driver not loaded". I have found no critical/error events that are being logged around the time of freeze occurring and are not logged during normal boot without starting the WLAN.