Acer 5101 problem

I have just bought an Aspire 5101. Since it arrived I have simply set the machine up and loaded sky broadband software and Mcaffee antivirus (I did not install Norton). Since then the notebook keeps freezing, sometimes unfreezing after a few seconds but mostly requiring me to hold the start button to shut it down. The longest I have managed to stay active is about 5 minutes.When I manage to get in and look the CPU usage regularly goes to 100% and processes are up around the 60 mark.


Any ideas would be gratefully received.

 

Can you get to task manager to see what is running in the background?

 

I had the exact same problem. My system would intermittently lock up for several seconds on me. Most of the times it would unfreeze and become usable again within 10-20 seconds, but sometimes it would require a hard shutdown. In my case, it was a defect on the mainboard. I found that if I removed the memory from bank 1 and inserted it into bank 2, my system stopped freezing on me.

In your case though, it sounds more like a software-related issue. Any ideas as to what's taking up all the resources?

 

I had approximately 60 processes running but the top ones in terms of processor usage are:

SVCHost.exe x 6 (2 x network service, 3 x system,1 x local service)
MCShield.exe
MSKSrvr.exe
mghtml.exe
mcupdmgr.exe
mcupui.exe
Acer.empowering.framework.Launcher.exe
taskmgr.exe
explorer.exe
cli.exe x 3
epower_DMC.exe
mpfTray.exe
McVSEscn.exe
WMIPRVSE.exe x 2 (1 x network service 1 x system)
Memcheck.exe
mscifapp.exe

 

Managed to solve the problem by uninstalling McAfee. The notebook now runs fine and I assume that the problems were caused by conflicts between McAfee and the windows firewall and the router firewall.