Vista "updating" for three days

JohnInTX

Joined Jun 26, 2012
4,787
Late to the party and hopefully it's on the way to being fixed. Your symptoms could be due to not enough RAM along with not enough virtual memory (disk space to swap to). It just thrashes. My wife's old Vista laptop did that. More RAM then more HDD took care of it. Then a Lenovo AIO from Costco fixed it for good. Maybe the latest 'improvements' from MS were too big for your rig to swallow.
A failing HDD can cause that, too - lots of retries for every read.
Good luck.
 

Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
The HDD partition is 100G and the RAM is 4G.
I actually don't know if that's enough.
What I do know is that the copy from February sat there, well behaved, until the minute I told it the password for my router. Then, Zoom...off to the 50% CPU usage as soon as it connects.
 

SLK001

Joined Nov 29, 2011
1,549
If I have more RAM that one version of Vista can even count, that probably means I have enough RAM for Vista to run.
That's true. MS, in all their wisdom, only mapped their 32bit OS's to use 3GB of RAM - even though it is capable of using more.

Does your router have hardwire capabilities? You could possibly indict or exonerate your wireless card.
 

Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
Does your router have hardwire capabilities? You could possibly indict or exonerate your wireless card.
Yeah, I can walk this computer to the kitchen and plug in. When I get tired of this Ubuntu O.S. being unable to use almost all the features of my printer, and it's inability to wake up from, "suspend" I will continue the search for the Micro$oft failure.
 

be80be

Joined Jul 5, 2008
2,072
Vista I had a laptop that came with it it had a 250 g hard drive and 4 g of ram it worked great till the dang thing updated It was a windows update that caused it I changed OS to windows 7 no more problems. I now run 10 I like it so far only problems been when it uf dates I have to turn off driver signing.some of the older usb drivers it don't like to use but they work fine with the signing turned off.
 

wayneh

Joined Sep 9, 2010
17,496
The HDD partition is 100G and the RAM is 4G.
I actually don't know if that's enough.
What I do know is that the copy from February sat there, well behaved, until the minute I told it the password for my router. Then, Zoom...off to the 50% CPU usage as soon as it connects.
Interesting that you say that. My brother switched ISPs recently and his computer immediately seemed seriously FUBAR. He eventually tracked it down to a flawed implementation of IP6 or something like that in the provider's modem. It took forever to figure that out but once he got them to give him a better (fully compliant) one he was back in business.

His computer is a Mac, so who knows if it has any relevance to your problem. But I was stunned that a flaky modem could make a computer appear to be destroyed.
 

Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
His computer is a Mac, so who knows if it has any relevance to your problem. But I was stunned that a flaky modem could make a computer appear to be destroyed.
That's still a possibility when you consider that Vista is complaining that it can't update and it goes into using 50% CPU the minute I tell it the password to the router.
 

Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
Vista I had a laptop that came with it it had a 250 g hard drive and 4 g of ram it worked great till the dang thing updated It was a windows update that caused it
That's a possibility, too. My first thought was, "poisoned update?"
M$ probably wants me using W10, but I am using Linux right now.:D
I don't want to deal with W10 refusing to use drivers that have been working for years. I have also had problems with newer versions of Windows unable to use some hardware I have. I love my laser printer, but it took a long time before the Mfg made a driver that would work with Vista. Dog knows if that driver will work with W10, and the Mfg surely won't write a new driver for a 10 year old printer.:(

I think I'm about to lose an excellent printer to, "improvements" by M$.
 

Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
Just an update for the denizens of AAC. My computer has been trying to run something at 50% of CPU for nearly 3 months.
Every time I start it, I go through Task Manager and shut off svchost.exe/50%. Three minutes later, svchost.exe starts using 50% of my CPU and I do that again. After that, it runs at 1% to 3% of CPU power until I shut it off and re-start it. If I forget, the fans rev up to remind me that heat is building up from the unnecessary and unknown process. I still have no idea what it's trying to run at 50% all the time, but I know how to defeat it.

Everything on the computer runs properly with two instances of svchost.exe/50% manually shut down. That means svchost.exe/50% is not doing anything I need. Virus? Spyware? Poisoned update? Big Brother scanning for kiddie porn? I'll probably never know. This is a Vista computer, which means it is obviously rather old...more than 10 years. It will die and I'll be forced into W10 if I ever want my printer to work. At that point, I will be automatically reporting every keystroke, anyway. Several virus scanners can't find anything wrong. I'm just going to let it ride until this computer dies of natural causes.
 

SLK001

Joined Nov 29, 2011
1,549
Did you ever install Process Explorer? It gives you more information about what processes within svchost are running wild. I have this happen with Firefox running Flash - after a while, it just runs to 50% until killed. That's why I use flashblock and don't run anything flash based unless absolutely necessary.

I've had Vista installs that would do what you have - they would even TURN THEMSELVES ON to do this after a standby. I ended up just reloading the OS to fix (I won't use Vista, it was just an evaluation of the machine).
 

wayneh

Joined Sep 9, 2010
17,496
On Macs, an endless CPU burn for no apparent reason can often be traced back to Flash. Steve Jobs was right to move away from it. I hate Flash, and thankfully it is dying.
 

BR-549

Joined Sep 22, 2013
4,928
#12----check your event viewer under administrative events. Does Vista have an event viewer?

Does Vista have a resource monitor? Maybe one could be installed.
 
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