is my computer fucked?

TheKoolEagle

hey, so last night my computer shut off randomly, I assume it overheated and cut out as a safety procedure. After I restarted it I loaded back into windows, my computer took forever to load up programs, I opened up my task manager and saw my cpu use was at 100%

I restarted my computer again to see if that would solve the issue, my computer will now not load windows. It will sit on the windows loading screen until it flashes a BSOD and restarts.

Tonight when I get home I'm going to grab my XP disc and try to repair the OS, but looking for other suggestions, my cpu is running hella hot from what i saw, like 86 C. currently i'm in denial that the cpu got overheated and got fucked up from it, so i'm looking for any other ideas/thoughts on what happened to my computer

Dedian

TheKoolEagle wrote: »

hey, so last night my computer shut off randomly, I assume it overheated and cut out as a safety procedure. After I restarted it I loaded back into windows, my computer took forever to load up programs, I opened up my task manager and saw my cpu use was at 100%

I restarted my computer again to see if that would solve the issue, my computer will now not load windows. It will sit on the windows loading screen until it flashes a BSOD and restarts.

Tonight when I get home I'm going to grab my XP disc and try to repair the OS, but looking for other suggestions, my cpu is running hella hot from what i saw, like 86 C. currently i'm in denial that the cpu got overheated and got fucked up from it, so i'm looking for any other ideas/thoughts on what happened to my computer

How's the cooling situation? CPU/Case/Power fan all working and clean (make sure to blow the dust out of the heatsink on your CPU). While this won't fix the 100% CPU issue, it will make things a little easier on the CPU (whatever's running at 100% is probably causing the CPU to overheat and turn the machine off). What was the BSOD message? If you rebooted right after the machine was overheating, it may still be way too hot. If you shut it totally down for a half hour, does it boot up and work for a while, only to overheat? Is this a retail or home-build computer? If you put it together yourself, did you apply thermal paste correctly on the CPU? If it's older, the paste may have lost some of its ability to transfer heat away.

Repairing Windows (unless rebooting in the middle of booting messed something up) probably isn't necessary

Once back in semi-stable windows, we'll see what that 100% CPU is about...

TheKoolEagle

well this happened last night, i tried booting it up this morning when my room was nice and cold but to no avail, i've had it overheat like this before due to my room getting too warm but generally it doesn't run super hot. I can't tell what the BSOD message is because it literally appears for less then a second and then reboots.

I tried to start up in safe mode but it shows me some spiffy messages about my partitions and then does the BSOD and restarts.

once i get home i'll blow some of the dust out of the heatsink in hopes that will help it out a bit.

the 100% cpu thing still is baffling to me because i could open my task manager and checked to see if something was eating all my processing power, but there wasn't anything

Dedian

TheKoolEagle wrote: »

well this happened last night, i tried booting it up this morning when my room was nice and cold but to no avail, i've had it overheat like this before due to my room getting too warm but generally it doesn't run super hot. I can't tell what the BSOD message is because it literally appears for less then a second and then reboots.

I tried to start up in safe mode but it shows me some spiffy messages about my partitions and then does the BSOD and restarts.

once i get home i'll blow some of the dust out of the heatsink in hopes that will help it out a bit.

the 100% cpu thing still is baffling to me because i could open my task manager and checked to see if something was eating all my processing power, but there wasn't anything

Did you have "show processes from all users" checked? If so, maybe something nasty running under windows' radar

TheKoolEagle

i think i had it checked but its very well possible i didn't, obviously i can't double check right now to see, i'm praying this is software related as i have no qualms clearing out my hdds of everything and starting from the basics again, its a hell of a lot better then buying new parts to figure out what got fucked

Quantux

A bad driver can cause huge cpu loads that won't necessarily show up in task manager (they're part of some super secret system process). This happened to me with win7 x64 and my nforce usb. Everything's fine until I attempted to transfer gigs of stuff to the zune or phone and then the cpu is just pegged by an invisible process. It was a known issue with x64, nvidia chipsets, and 4GB of ram or more. For a while, the official "fix" was "Use less than 4GB of ram". They've since fixed the ms usb driver and it works now, but that's the only case I've ever seen with 100% cpu and no guilty processes.

I'd be more worried about the overheating. 86c is insane for a cpu and most mainboards auto-shutoff at that temp by default. Blow out all the fans and make sure they're spinning. Also if you've had heat shutdown issues before from just a warm room, you may want to add some fans...

Jeltz

Quantux wrote: »

A bad driver can cause huge cpu loads that won't necessarily show up in task manager (they're part of some super secret system process).

Yep, they run in kernel mode, which is not part of any process... it's the kernel. In the task manager tab that shows the CPU and memory graphs, activate the "show kernel times" option, and you should be able to see CPU usage by the kernel (and any drivers) as a separate red line in the CPU graph.

TheKoolEagle

ok, well i wasn't able to repair windows so i'm reformatting in hopes that it will start up, if it loads windows then i'll move onto the next step of getting better heat management, if it doesn't i will most likely cry because i don't have the money to replace parts/buy a new rig

when i say i've had the issue before about my computer overheating i'm talking about 3 times in the past 2 years, but i agree it is running a lot hotter then it should, i can't find my canned air so i can't blow out the heatsink with it, all the other fans are working though

Dedian

Pre-post edit: Move cleaning (and at least looking at heat management with what you have available) to the top of your list. If you're having overheating issues, you're going to have problems installing windows, too.

Every year or so I like to tear apart my computer, take stuff outside, and blow all the crap out... it's pretty gross what accumulates in there (maybe I just need to clean my room more ). I usually re-apply thermal stuff at that time and make sure everything's put back nice and tidy so airflow can do its thing in the closed case...

I'm guessing at least cleaning out the CPU heatsink of dust, and maybe a little vacuuming in there (just don't vacuum up jumper pins or anything ) will take care of a lot of the heat issues. Clean install can't hurt either!

TheKoolEagle

yeah so sorry i haven't updated the thread here, i did reformat and it worked properly! yay!

my issue now is i downloaded the latest nvidia driver for my 8800 GTS and it keeps erroring and stopping the install halfway through, then it wants me to insert a disc to revert the windows files back to their original state but won't tell me what disc it wants and my windows cd doesn't work. planning on just reformatting again tonight to clear up that issue, I couldn't find my original cd that came with my videocard to install those drivers, could that be what is causing the issue?

also dust cleaning is next on the list here so hopefully i can take my temps down like 20c

travathian

TheKoolEagle wrote: »

i've had it overheat like this before due to my room getting too warm but generally it doesn't run super hot.

This shouldn't happen. Unless your room is getting to like 100F the stock cooling solution on a properly installed and designed system is more than capable of handling ambients in the 'warm' range. Did you build this pc? Ever cleaned it out?

TheKoolEagle

i did build it, i've cleaned it out about twice since i bought it, which was about 3 years ago, it definitely needs another cleaning, probably new thermal paste but the heatsink is such a bitch to get off of it

Stormwatcher

When in doubt always 1) remove the cooler, 2) clean the old paste, 3) VERY CAREFULLY apply new paste, 4) reseat the cooler.