I have seen problems that were native only to an AMD processor believe it or not. That was way back in the win98 days and I never got anything but an Intel after that, it is the one the software developers are going to spend the time with to test their software....
My guess: something lower level....like a hardware driver.....for your video or even your ethernet adapter. I would try to uninstall and then reinstall your drivers with the latest releases.
Thanks guys. Looks like a full reformat with the most recent drivers may be the best option. I installed Diskeeper yesterday and ran a full defrag, so we'll see if that helps today or not. Here's a question - what should the CPU Usage and Usage History in the Windows Task Manager look like when running your trading app's? With the trading app's being more resource hogs, should I just assume that these spikes that I now notice are par for the course or should it stay relatively low for the most part? I guess that's the real question as I don't know what this *should* look like. Thanks
Post a screenshot of task manager on the "processes" tab during what you percieve as the problem before you do anything drastic. If there is a scroll bar post 2 shots.
I had the same problem with a brand new PC once. With no additional programs installed it ran at 100% I found the cause to be 'Spam Killer' in McAfee.
Here's what I was able to get frank before it just completely froze up on me again today: COMPUTER #1: COMPUTER #2 AT THE SAME TIME: Prior to the OEC.exe on computer #1 jumping, I was running ok on both computers. #1 still was touching 100% but did not enter a hanging state until this afternoon where I was lucky enough to get a snagit and then had to shut down. Something happened that caused the trader.exe, which is openecry's exe, to almost double in Mem Usage at a random point in the day.
you might have a corrupted database. back up the db file and start over again. That should isolate the db to see if it is the culprit.
<a href="http://tinypic.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://i23.tinypic.com/5oh9bs.jpg" border="0" alt="Image and video hosting by TinyPic"></a> Above is running ~2.2 GHz AMD single CPU 1G RAM This is with photoshop, excel, and real time trading platform streaming in background. The small 10% spike occurred while doing some photoshop work. Notice it's only 2% of CPU avg. I suspect that the 446,000k your trader.exe process is running on your taskbar snapshot is way too high. Mine takes a very small fraction of that, although I'm not running the same app. Maybe some other posters who are using your trading app (OEC?) can chime in. Sounds like the trading app/hardware interface is the problem from descriptions so far. Your task mgr doesn't look like it's exhibiting any virus symptoms -- you can try to kill msmsgs.exe temporarily, but it probably won't help much. ------------------------------------------------
Take a look at how it looks after I reboot the computer: I imagine that's more normal. Something is going on causing the trader.exe to spike to a very high level. I have an email into their tech, so we'll see what they say but it seems so odd that it is spiking so much!
Everything points to either a) trader.exe being the problem b) possibly AMD compatibility problem as other poster mentioned (i.e. trader.exe compatibility problem). Even on your good computer, that is a lot of memory drain for an application. Notice it also hogged double to quadruple the initial memory (94 M at startup, ramps to 262M and 446M, respectively). From virus pt of view, your task bar looks fine. Something is causing the trader program to go into a runaway state where it is hogging up so much ram that it hits a ceiling and your computer can't handle the load anymore and crashes. You can also ask them to email you another copy of their software and reinstall it (maybe yours is corrupt). Point out that when their program is not running, the computer works fine and your other apps drain minimal memory and CPU resources. By the way, you haven't mentioned what happens if you kill the process (trader.exe) and then snapshot your CPU usage screen, and try a few things like scrolling the ET window. Does the CPU usage still spike to 100%? If not, that's more verification of trader.exe being the culprit.