Acer Aspire running high CPU usage (lots of hardware interrupts?)

[ccoll]

My Acer Aspire had a problem a year back being really slow. It was so slow that even sounds were completely jittered. I sent it off to Acer, they wiped it and reinstalled Windows XP, and sent it back to me again - "fixed". A few months later, the same problem is back again, and Acer won't fix it because it is now past warranty.

I run the Windows task manager and it says that there are no processes running at high CPU (hardly anything running at all, yet the total system CPU usage always hovers around 50% or more. Based on this, I am assuming is it hardware interrupt related.

Does anybody have a similar experience with an Acer product, or know what kind of things I can look at or tools I can run to see what is happening?

Thanks,

Chris

[ccoll]

I just tracked down a fix online, and it worked like a charm. This guy posted a fix:

http://frazzleddad.blogspot.com/2006...-hardware.html

Reposting the contents here in case the link disappears:

"Turns out ATA/IDE controllers will often revert back to PIO mode instead of Ultra-DMA. (MS KB article on the problem here.)

Check the problem by examining the controller’s Primary and Secondary IDE settings: Device Manager -> IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers -> Primary or Secondary IDE Channel -> Properties -> Advanced Settings. Look at the Current Transfer Mode field. If it’s “PIO” then it’s a FUBAR PITA and you’ll need to uninstall the driver, reboot and let XP do its magic reinstall. "