I have a friend with an IBM R40 notebook computer. He uses it to work with spreadsheets, documents, presentations, and to surf the internet.

After some minutes the computer will slow down to a crawl. I looked at his Task Manager the last time it happened and I saw that a process called "System" was using 90% of the CPU. Please note that this is not the System Idle Process one.

What is curious is that I have a similar notebook - same brand and model, same applications installed - and it doesn't show this behaviour. Anyone knows what can cause this?

Can you list the process's that are running?

has he got the Indexing Service turned on?

I believe we turned it off last week.

I'll try to get a list of his processes when I see him and when the problem is occuring.

See also

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841382/
(get the rollup for w2k sp4)

Does he use Trend AV? They had a bad update a little earlier this year which screwed a load of things, including this very problem.