AMD using up 100% easily

Hey everyone, Happy New Year and thanks in advance,

Ok here goes. My friend and I were playing Guild Wars and i experienced a bit of stuttering but shrugged it off as lag.It happened a bit more so I began to play in windowed mode and pulled up the Windows task manager; to my amazement i saw the game took 100% of my usage, sometimes 99%. I asked my friend do the same and his cpu usage was at 49 - 50%. He has a Pentium 4 socket 775 running @ 3.0 ghz with hyper threading, I have an AMD 64 3700+. The only thing i can think of is that the hyper threading is what makes his processor to appear to be using 49 percent and it see's Guild Wars as one thread. Am I right? If so does AMD have a "hyper threading" equivalent; if it does, how can i activate it?

something's not right, you're processor should be leaping out of your pc and smashing that p4 to bits.

sounds like a software prob

Yeah you probably just had a bad sprawl of random events that bought your computer to a crawl for some reason. It happens to the best of us AMD or otherwise. Usually it's just something like a virus checker program or whatever running in the background or a stupid bug in windows that the craptastic virus software didn't help with but I would bet the problem would sort itself out the next time you play after a reboot. Put it this way my rig which is nowhere near as good as yours played Guildwars, lag-free on *gasp* DIAL-UP! So I see no reason for this sort of behavior to continue.

No dice, i just restarted windows and tested it again, GW is still taking up 99% of the system load. No antivirus running in the background, otherwise the antivirus would show up in the task manager as taking up some of the usage as well. I shut off autoprotect and the same thing still happens. Damnit.

*edit. Now i'm running a spyware program and norton 2005 to check for viruses, i remember at work one of the computers was using 100% when opening up a simple web browser regardless of the type, that was a virus. hope i didn't catch something like that. Damnit linux keeps looking better and better....

If it's only guild wars you're having trouble with exclusively, then I'd start with looking at any patches for GW.

Good point but yeah if it's an all inclusive problem as in everything is effected and it's always at 100% then I'd say a serious scanning spree is in order.

Most games take up all the CPU you throw at them, unless they are bottlenecking very heavily on the video card. 99% usage for a game is pretty normal. However, if his performance is choppy, make sure he has his motherboard's chipset drivers installed and DMA enabled on all drives. Using a system without DMA cripples your overall system performance.

AT, what's DMA? I'm lost, gameplay isn't choppy but sometimes in huge places like outposts and towns where all the online players congregate theres stuttering, which is typical as i've seen it on any computer. But this DMA should be interesting. How do i enable it? moreover how to i update my motherboard drivers/bios. When it comes to motherboards and chipsets n all that good stuff i'm completely lost:D

edit* i did have a virus, wiped that bastard out, and the problem still persists, the name of the virus was trojan.PSPBrick that came with a Playstation Portable firmware downgrader. All the PSP forums said that that this is normal and norton always says its a virus. The name of the actual contaminated file was "overflow.tif" The downgrade on the psp worked with that file, so i dont' know if it really was a virus, its gone from my pc now though. bah window's and its virii vulnerability!

Hope this helps:
(DMA--Direct Memory Access)
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=258757
Updating the BIOS is as simple as going to Evga's site and getting the currect version (don't go beta as it can mess stuff up) and then you should be prompted to replace you current version with your new one I belive (it's been a while).

I wasn't talking about flashing the BIOS, I was referring to downloading the latest chipset drivers from the mobo manufacturer and installing them. :P

Ohhh, The DMA on the microsoft website is for windows 95. I have XP so i'm assuming its on by default. I'm going to head over to evga now. Should i uninstall anything before installing these chipset drivers; or simply install these over the old ones? Thanks.