Right, I have tried everything, and my laptop is dying. I’m running out of ways to diagnose what is wrong.

Its a 2011 HP G42 (2.1GHz, 4GB Ram).vThe main problem is that after about 15 minutes, CPU usage goes up to 100% and won’t come back down, even when I close all programs/non-essential services/background apps etc.

I’ve run every kind of antivirus scan I know about, used CCleaner, removed all the start up programs I don’t need. I don’t know what else to do.

I don’t want to reinstall windows, as I have a lovely copy of Adobe CS5 that I got from my old employer that I won’t be able to replace.

Any suggestions?

Not full of fluff is it?

If you look in task manager what’s using the resources? You should be able to see individual services etc and work out what it is.

If you look in task manager what’s using the resources?

Windows explorer (explorer.exe) is using all the resources. I can’t exactly close that one down…

My works laptop did this

Solution was to bin it and get a new one due to the gpu having died apparently.

Win7? Anything in event viewer or reliability monitor? (perfmon /rel)

Wipe windoze and put Ubuntu or Xubuntu linux on it. 🙂 Much better 🙂

Ditch windows and use linux

Please will someone remind me what you go into to manage start up programmes?

msconfig

cheers

Try the following:

Switch off search indexing (you can switch it on again if that isn’t it)

Uninstall and then reinstall your AV soft (yes, that theoretically should make no difference but I have found it often does)

Safe mode boot – if the problem doesn’t appear in safe mode then you really know that the problem lies with software rather than your machine

process explorer (from Microsoft http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx) can sometimes do a better job than task manager at telling you what is causing the problems

Good luck

I did a search for “explorer.exe 100 cpu” and found lots of hits. The most promising seems to be a corrupt avi file causing the problem. See post #15 in http://club.myce.com/f3/explorer-exe-causes-100-cpu-usage-74137/#.UHxkyGewWDM