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

[Colin Law]

On 1 April 2010 14:36, Quin Wills <quin.wills at simugen-global.com> wrote:
>>> 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.

When the cpu is at 100% top will show which process it is.  Or do you
mean it is completely locked up so you cannot even get to top?  In
which case this is a lockup not a process consuming too much cpu

Colin