computer CPU hijacked and is at 100% in vegas and premiere
 

I think my system has been hijacked but I need some opinions befroe I act. I have noticed that when I hit play in vegas and especially premiere (on screen or to an external monitor) my cpu usage (seen through alt-ctl-delete) is near or at 100%. I have used norton to check for viruses, but nothing comes up. I used adware and spybot (which also revs it up to 100% and shouldn't) to delete anything that might be hiding with no change. Actually before I used these utilities I had noticed that it was at 100% even when idle, but now only with some apps like premiere. Do I reinstall Win XP, where do I go from here.

P.S.
I have an athlon64, 1gb ram, 7200 serial ata hard drives, and win XP.

What you need to do is open task manager (as you've already
done, which you can also do by right-clicking on an empty spot
on the toolbar below with your application buttons on it and
selecting task manager).

Go into the processes tab and click on the CPU column header
until system idle process is up on top. This will realtime sort
your list of processes to whichever is using the CPU most.

Now play your footage or do what you have to do and see
what happens. Is it Vegas or Premiere that takes so much cpu
time or is it something else?

Do you know if your harddisks are ACTUALLY running in DMA
mode or not? If not, this can definitely be the source of your
problems. Otherwise I would look into checking to see if you
have the latest drivers for everything first.

When you say you 'hit play' it jumps to 100% CPU usage, do you mean when you are editing a project and you 'hit play' to preview the project?

If so, I can see where an Athlon might peg out at 100% trying to preview a project with a lot of transition and effects. Is your preview quality in Vegas set to "Best"? Set it to one of the lower settings and see if that changes things.

I checked, it is not a DMA problem, and by play I mean the clip is on the timeline and I am either simply viewing it on the screen or on an external monitor with no rendering or other editing going on. It looks like I may have to format the drive.

format the drive? don't be reactive. it won't help you.
do what Rob says. open the task manager and see which executable is sucking up all your cpu processing time when you hit play. if it's the NLE software, then take a look at what kind of rendering you have to do to display previews. are you trying to render huge image files? do you have tons of transitions, overlays, etc?

I'm not convinced you have a problem.

I am willing to give it a try, only I do not hold out much in the way of hope because I am using auto previw or draft. I will post my results.

Does this only happen when you go to an external monitor for the preview?

Sorry for the late response. To answer your question, no, it also happens when I use a utility such as spybot or adware, etc. The cpu reads at or near 100% and should not. As I said before I have an athlon64 with plenty of ram, so a small utility should not be slowing down my system to the extent that it has. Frankly I used be able to run more than one NLE at a time and still not reach 100%, so there has been a change. At this point it may be worth starting over, unless I can get some answers. Either way, thanks guys for the input.

Dwight

Again, you should look at what is happening exactly. Without
this information it is impossible to tell.

The size of a program has NOTHING to do with its CPU or any
other resources consumption. I can write a program in 2-10
lines of code that will take 100% CPU usage of however many
CPU's you have installed.

CPU usuage is overrated as well, it doesn't mean that much.

The line you just said "Frankly I used be able to run more than one NLE at a time and still not reach 100%"
is far more important. The question I have with this line is:

what do you mean when you say "run" in that line above?

Running an application is not the same as having it do realtime
DV encoding or realtime preview with effects.

You have yet to give us the results of the questions we asked,
without them there is nothing more I can add to this.

You have a virus in your computer. Go to microsoftupdate.com and install the security updates. Get an updated anti-virus program and install it. Even so, you might only be able to solve the problem by reinstalling Windows.

Good luck,
Arnaldo

My shot at this problem:
Norton Antivirus can really slow down your computer. If you have that, try disabling it temporarily.

You should probably disable real-time scanning anyways. Be sure it automatically scans emails, gets definitions, and scans overnight.

AVG and Avast are good free antivirus programs. NOD32 and PCIllin are good commercial ones. (Avast and PCIllin I have not tried. Other people seem to like them.)

Arnaldo: you don't know that, please state it more like "you could
have a virus" etc. Thank you.

Indeed, disabling things like virus scanners while working is
definitely a good thing to do (except for e-mail scanning
perhaps). Anyway, we could probably see if it was the virus
scanner if the test with the process list was done.

Ups! My mistake. You'r correct.

I refrase my statement: You could have a virus.

"Actually before I used these utilities I had noticed that it was at 100% even when idle"

I came across a friends computer with that problem and after updating Windows XP with all the security patches and an updated anti-virus, the problem remained:

Boot.
System iddle with minimum CPU usage during a wile.
After that, CPU usage goes to 100% and stays there.
Got to task manager and end process.
Seems OK but after a wile goes again to CPU 100%.

Reinstalled Windows XP, installed all updates and patches, installed updated anti-virus.

The system has been runnig like a charm since then.


Best regards and good luck to Dwight.
Arnaldo

I disabled the anti-virus program (norton) without much success, the machine is still running slow. BTW when this problem first started the cpu was running at 100% even when I was not running any programs (I also checked task master for this). I then ran adaware and spybot several times, and now it still happens, but not when the system is idle. When I am using my NLE and I get this problem I am not previewing in RT mode, rather I am usually in draft. Moreover I am not rendering or doing any of the things one might rightfully expect to slow down the machine. I am almost certain this came to my machine from the web, as I do not place floppies or CDs in the machine without a thorough scan.

If you end up reinstaling Windows, consider doing it in a dual boot configuration. You will have a safety net for problems like this and others that can mess up your computer.

Best regards,
Arnaldo