How's my CPU's health now?

Hi everyone,

I have an Acer TravelMate 4000 Laptop. I bought it 3 years ago.

Its current specification:
Pentium M Centrino 1.5 Ghz, 2MB L2 Cache
1G of RAM
40GB HDD
Intel Graphic Card 64MB (Shared)

Recently, I've found that my CPU usage's getting high very easily even it gets 50-70% or sometimes 90% usage just for scrolling up and down a webpage in IE7. Furthermore, it also gets high while I view the photos by normal Windows Picture Viewer. In the past, I could play some games like Halflife or Couter Strike, but now I dare not play any game like those because the CPU's contantly running and its fan is very noisy, while I'm playing game.

What do u think about its health with the above symptoms?

Thank you very much!

 

hello,
have you ever cleaned out the laptops fans?
if not you should strongly consider doing so.
have you cleaned out tempory files and done a defrag?
lodore

 

Thanks, but I clean it very regularly and well
And I defrag my HDD almost once a week

 

have you installed anything inbetween it working fine and the lots of cpu usage?
lodore

 

I think it might be your HDD.

 

Hi, folks: Before you get the bottom of problem, why not try out this one:
CPUCool. Goodluck.

 

In general, the number of programs that I used are not changed very much. I just update the newer versions for instance antivirus program. I also updated the BIOS

 

Ok I'll explain. One symptom of a failing HDD is intensive CPU usage.

 

So what's your suggestion now? Buy a new HDD or do you know any program to check it?

 

What brand HDD? To find out Belarc Advisor.

Then go to manu's site for diag. tool.

Or I use HD Tune.
http://www.hdtune.com/

 

Don't know how much this applies to laptops since I do not have one, but with my system I was starting to get random issues and reboots and discovered the CPU was running at too high a temperature, so I cleaned and remounted the CPU heat since using Artic Silver. It immediately resolved the problems I was having.

 

Hi, I'd like to know if anyone, who's using the same laptop's specifications, has the same problem?

 

You've had it for 3 years...the TIM is probably done with, cracked up, shaked loose from the CPU. just crack it open and reapply, that should fix it.

 

Thanks, but what's the TIM?

 

It's the stuff between the CPU and the CPU's heat sink. It fills in the gaps between those two things, thus transfering the heat from CPU to heatsink. If the TIM is dried up and not working like it should, the CPU will overheat and crash the system. To determine if this is the case, run Coretemp to find out what the CPU's temperature is doing. IF it gets real high real fast then crashes, you know what's happening.

 

Thanks for your explaination, eniqmah!
I checked my CPU's heat by SpeedFan program. I noticed its minimum temperature is about 50C. Is it too high?

 

Seems normal for a laptop. It's not the lowest temp you're looking for, it's rather the rate of change and the maximum temp.

 

I have a Compaq laptop with similar specifications as yours. My CPU temp. runs between 37 degrees C and 49 degrees C.

Fast scrolling will bring the CPU usage to 35%, slow scrolling 4%. Viewing photos the CPU will PEAK at 80% for a fraction of a second (for a photo of 12 MB) 35% (for a photo of 20 KB).

I have always used these cooling bases for my laptop (4 fans altogether).
If I were you I'd take it in for service and have it checked for your peace of mind.