Runaway system process

[grumpy]

Very strange. Mine works above and beyond.

My SP1 worked perfectly and its performance was the main reason for me getting the SP2 as soon as it became available. In fact, my first SP2 seemed to work fine for the first month. Then the screen started creaking (which I was content to live with), then the battery level started resetting (which got progressively worse), and finally the CPU utilization issues. Not to mention the problems that seem common to everyone (e.g. SD card/hibernation). Personally, I find it interesting that my issues seem to be somewhat unique and I somehow managed to receive two SP2s with similarly unique issues.

 

[GoodBytes]

I wonder, if you got the same system from the same batch, and batch is faulty. As it's not a problem that is in your face visible at the manufacture, it got a pass.

 

[grumpy]

Well, I may have found the solution to the problem, or more accurately, a solution to the annoying symptom of the the still unknown problem. I disabled the "MemoryDiagnostic" tasks in the "Task Scheduler". It has been nearly a week and I have not had the unexplained CPU usage. Clearly, there is still something wrong, since those task should not result in the behavior I have observed. But, for now, it makes the SP2 less annoying to use until I get another replacement.

I wonder, if you got the same system from the same batch, and batch is faulty. As it's not a problem that is in your face visible at the manufacture, it got a pass.

Judging from the serial numbers, I doubt they are from the same batch. I suspect that there may be a battery manufacturing issue. The last three firmware updates addressed battery issues and they seemed to affect different groups of people differently.

 

[Rvacha]

grumpy - If you go to MemoryDiagnostic you'll notice that it is not a scheduled task, it is a triggered task. Click on the "Triggers" tab for a list of things that trigger it. On my SP2 GDR1 machine all triggers are specific log/event IDs. Perhaps you can dig into the source of those events to find your problem

 

[grumpy]

I just did the March update. I have re-enabled the offending tasks and I am going to try and see if this update fixes my high CPU usage issues. I did not have this SP2 long before I applied the Feb update, but I did not notice problem until after the update. Of course, my original SP2 (sans Feb update) seemed to exhibit a similar issue, so who knows. I am also interested in seeing if this update fixes my wacky battery problems. Even if the issues appear fixed with this update, I can't help but feel that there are underlying hardware issue that these firmware updates try and work around. After all, the updates often affect users differently indicating that the hardware is not as "uniform" as it should be.

grumpy - If you go to MemoryDiagnostic you'll notice that it is not a scheduled task, it is a triggered task. Click on the "Triggers" tab for a list of things that trigger it. On my SP2 GDR1 machine all triggers are specific log/event IDs. Perhaps you can dig into the source of those events to find your problem

There are two memory diagnostic tasks - "ProcessMemoryDiagnosticEvents" and "RunFullMemoryDiagnostic". ProcessMemoryDiagnosticEvents has multiple defined triggers and initially I only disabled that task, but it did not alleviate the problem. It was was only after I disabled the RunFullMemoryDiagnostic task that the high CPU usage issues appeared to cease. I perused the logs and could find no clues to this behavior.

It has only been a short time since I re-enabled the tasks, but they have both since run and there have been no ill effects (yet) - so fingers crossed...