System twitches

[Tarry]

Following a power failure, my computer has been 'twitching', or pausing briefly about every 1-2 seconds. I see it as a brief pausing in the mouse as I move it around, and I also hear a corresponding twitch in the audio if I play music. These are simultaneous and continuous, from boot up onwards. System restore hasn't helped. It's like Chinese water torture! Has anyone got any ideas about what's wrong and how to fix it?

[squirrel]

What OS? Computer manufacturer(i.e. Dell)? Model (i.e. GX1)? Has your Computer recently gotten wet?  Have you scanned the disk for errors?

[Mac]

Try running chkdsk and see if that fixes things.

I had this happen and had to delete a couple of files but all the others are OK and so is the player.

[amandar]

First, just for this test, stop all ongoing 'things' you have running for a moment, like playing music or applications you can close just for a bit.

When you bring up the Task Manager (ctrl-alt-delete) after that and look at the Processes tab, is the largest percentage of your CPU usage (CPU column) for the System Idle Process? If it's not, you may have some program or service running in the background that is eating up your CPU. This can be something you mean to have running (an early version of Google Notifier did this on my system until I updated it) or it could be malware that has somehow made its way onto your system and is now running in the background on your machine.

If the System Idle Process is taking up most of your CPU usage though, this probably isn't the case.

[Tarry]

My system is XP, no name computer. It hasn't got wet, and the problem happened after a power loss anyway. Scan disk didn't show anything. The task manager is showing 50 processes, but the System Idle Process CPU usage varies between 60 and 98%. The only other thing running is mpservic.exe (not sure what that does), which makes up the remainder of the 100%. Does that give any more clues?

[Fed]

I just checked my computer task manager, I'm running 20 processes but that includes 7 antivirus/spyware/firewall related things.
My System Idle Process sits on 98/99.

If you think it relates to the power outage you may have got a spike. Run a test on your ram and from a good housekeeping point of view look at your 50 processes and see if you need them all.
You may well finish up better than when the problem started.

[merlin_2]

Run a trojan scan! check firewall logs! check the events log//control panel/admin tools........run trend online scan...