Most of us have at least once faced the problem of a PC getting sluggish all in a moment. And we may conclude that it is due to a low memory or a demanding program. The above conclusion is not correct always as I found out the hard way a few days ago.

I have a system with P IV 3GHz and 512 MB RAM on an Intel 8915GAV original MB. I have raced it to 100% CPU and tried to hang it, but never succeeded. So I was pretty confident about my system.

But last day it was real slow, and task manager showed 17% system usage for which not one of the live processes were responsible. So I switched to Process Explorer NT and found out that HardWare Interrupts were killing me. I was wondering what it actually did to my system. It was then that I realized something. I had a loose CD drive IDE cable coz of frequent plugging and unplugging. I gave a push and everything came back to normal.

So next time you system starts to ignore you follow the following steps

1 . Take Task Manager (ALT+CTRL+DEL). First look on the graphs and then check the process list to find out which process is eating up your system.
2 . If it is not a system process, AntiVirus/Firewall and if it is not important to you, Kill It (Right Click on the process and take End Process).
3 . If it is a hardware Interrupt the check out the tighten the HDD, CDD/DVDD, FDD drive cables.(Be sure to know your way through an open CPU, else don’t even try)

Ending critical system tasks may make your system unstable or you may lose your data. Be sure you really know what you are doing

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