Win98 high CPU usage problem

[d3monn]

Hi,

A friend of mine from work has a computer with Windows 98 SE on it and he's been having some problems ever since he upgraded. He first upgraded to a 1.X (i think it was 1.5 Ghz) celeron, and he installed windows 98, and all the programs for his work, and after bootup his computer uses around 38-70% CPU usage sitting on idle. So far he's brought the machine in to a shop and they suggested he replace the motherboard/cpu, (now a P4 2.8Ghz i beleive) so he did that and still had the same problem. After that, he was told to replace the RAM, which he did, he still had the same problem. So, he decided to reformat and reinstall everything, which didn't help any.

I personally looked at the machine, and on bootup thought it was the video card, since it would randomly display ASCII characters on the post screen on every second or third boot (this card was PCI, and there was no onboard graphics). Now we borrowed a 64 MB ATI AGP card, and tried it, and still the same problem with the CPU usage, but doing this fixed the random glitching. I told him to try removing all startup items and use base video and such, and doing so makes the machine boot up only using 2% CPU usage, but once you open up an Explorer based window, the CPU usage jumps and remains in the above 50% range, even after idle.

Would anyone know of any solutions for this problem? The only thing is he must remain with a DOS-based Windows OS, due to the fact that the industrial printers work only with DOS. He tried using Windows 2000/XP and the printers wouldnt work, or work correctly.

Any suggestions would be awesome, I've looked everywhere and can't find anything or any other suggestions on what to do other than reformat and reinstall everything, although this didn't prove helpful before.

EDIT::: I forgot to include the fact that his machine also either completely locks up, or gives the blue screen of death whenever it is left in idle for too long.

Thanks in advance.

Edited March 3, 2005 by d3monn

[null_]

You might want to check out other hardware in/and connected to the machine...

[d3monn]

You might want to check out other hardware in/and connected to the machine...

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I've looked at mostly everything, the sound is on board, all the drivers are up to date and the BIOS is updated to the newest version available. Like I said, I plug in a PE disc of Windows XP, with all default drivers and I'm getting no problems. The guy said that he had XP installed on it before, and there were no problems except for the fact that he couldnt work the printers from the machine.

Any other ideas?

[WiZzArD]

You're running 98 on a 2.8Ghz Pentium 4? That poor PC! :cry:

Seriosuly though, I doubt you could run anything less than 2000 on that properly, although XP would be preferable to 2K because of HyperThreading support.