CPUs running at 100% (Hardy Heron, Dell XPS M1330)

[Quin Wills]

>> Hi
>>
>> I've one of the Dell XPS M1330 machines that come shipped with Hardy
>> LTS (Dual Core T7300 2GHz/800Mhz 4MB Cache, 2GB RAM). I've had it for
>> a year and use it for scientific computing.
>>
>> As of about 2 weeks ago I notice that the my youtube and BBC iplayer
>> playback started becoming jerky after a few minutes into any video.
>> I've not made any software changes recently. I ran the usual DELL
>> hardware checks and reinstalled my flash plugins, without improvement.
>> My laptop began freezing, including with standard applications like
>> openoffice or when running a CPU intensive job during analysis (I code
>> in R). So the problem appears to be my CPUs and I've confirmed, using
>> the system monitor, that they rapidly hit 100% before my laptop freezes.
>>
>> I see there are some CPU tests out there, but have never
>> tinkered/tested with any CPUs before. I prize this machine (a lot) and
>> have heard horror stories around naive CPU testing. This has become a
>> real problem for me - I use this machine 10+ hours a day - so any
>> advice on what I should do next (explained to me like I'm an idiot)
>> and what the problem is likely to be would be very, very, very welcome!
>>
>> Thanks a stack,
>> Quin
>
>       Open a terminal and then type top. You will see a very busy
> display and at the top it will show you the cpu amount used. If your
> reaching near 100% use there must be something wrong.  On my Lucid which
> is up to beta 1 now, uses about 10% of the cpu. If I get Firefox to look
> at a busy web page it goes up to around 40%.
>
>    If your seeing 100% try turning off the laptop and then turn it on
> again and quick look at the cpu usage. Now watch the most cpu used by
> the list below the cpu data. Is any of them using more than 10% of the
cpu?
>
> 73 Karl

Thanks for that Karl

I should probably have mentioned that I did 'top' and found that just
running Firefox takes ~12% when opened to my Gmail, which I figured as
probably fine-ish (thanks for confirming). I was initially worried that this
might be a Firefox thing and re-installed it too. But no luck. And now of
course, it's happening with any just about anything. Opening up Openoffice,
a PDF and Firefox gets dangerous... but not consistently though. I'd say
(very roughly) about 1 in 3 times the CPU runs away and then freezes my
machine.

I couldn't (and still can't) see any other jobs/processes that are sucking
up the CPU. I'm still running on the assumption that this isn't hardware,
but not knowing much beyond the absolute basics of CPUs means I'm really
stuck here. Urgh! The love of Ubuntu is not strong with me today.

Quin
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