how do I figure out what's using all my CPU?
 

Every now and then my PC just freezes. The mouse moves, but I can't click anything.

If I'm typing in firefox, the letters stop showing up.... then suddenly everything will re-engage and all of my typed characters will fill in.

When this happens, I can see on my Task Manager that the CPU shoots up to 100% - how can I figure out wtf is happening so I can fix this POS?

Are you using a Windows System? You should be able to view the running processes along with their current CPU usage in the task manager.

Look at your processes in the task manager and sort it by clicking on the CPU tab.

its firefox man, get rid of it and switch to chrome, im running a quad core, with 8 gigs of ram and FF still manages to lock up

can't be firefox alone, I'm running similar setups on 5 different PCs and this is the only one that does it.

Clicking "processes" and viewing the memory usage doesn't give me any huge hints... firefox is the only one that's consistently high, and like I said - the problem is unique to this PC, not Firefox.

Do you have any plugins installed? Have you cleared your cookies and cache? Any firewall/spyware progs running?

firefox eats my cpu like no other especially when testing flash videos and or watching shit.

Hmmm lately i have same shit with FF! It freeze up my comp for few minutes, not always but often!

You want to sort by CPU, not Mem Usage... click on CPU :)

im telling u as soon as i put FF 3.5 on this machine it torqued it out ( quad core 8 gigs ram windows 7). I have FF 3.5 running at home on a core i7 (vista, eck!) with 6 gigs of DDR 3 tri channel and it works flawlessly

click processes, scroll to the right, look under CPU -> it's your anti-virus (my giess) - these are always CPU hogs

for me FF eats up my ram, but since I installed the FlashBlock add-on it uses much less ram since it allows you to play only the flash shit that you want. Right now I have no flash stuff running on gfy so the top center logo is not there, but the board runs fast and my ram usage is low. CPU usage is never that high when I use FF.

As for the thread starter mentioning the CPU usage.. ctrl-atl-delete, click on the processes tab and than click CPU twice to sort the list from highest to lowest in cpu usage. This will tell you what is using up your cpu.

Antivirus is the same on all computers, so that's not it.

System Idle Process is constantly at 90+, very little mem usage though.

Firefox stays below 20, idling at about 10 CPU average.

After that, everything shows a coupe of 1's and the rest 0's.

put pc out of freeze :D

That's the crap you have to post to get 17k? Sweet.

I noticed recently that Digsby has a new option now to "Donate your CPU time" and it's enabled by default after upgrade. If you run it, check that.

Speaking about flash usage,that is nice way to check howmuch memory/cpu using specified browser.Seems firefox still eating memory as abnormal,but he also uses almost 0 cpu compared to other browsers.Use following site for testing :
http://redfaction.com -this is heavy flash site with repeating sound.I noticed then opera uses less memory then firefox and ie but it takes 30 percent of cpu.

I've noticed the same problem no matter what browser I'm using lately. Could I have a bad processor or something?

It happens to me as well from time to time.. I dont like Chrome that much and HATE IE. so I will deal with this for now.

Go to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb896653.aspx and download process explorer. Run it and it'll tell you what apps are using CPU, eating memory,etc.

Thanks for the tips everyone.

It was Outlook that was doing it... I use google's outlook sync, and every time it was running (every 10 minutes) it would lock up when it encountered my Outlook data file. Since my sync isn't real important from this machine, I changed the sync settings to every 3 hours and viola! problem solved.