Strange problem with TB CF-27.

I have a project CF-27 that I bought to tinker with. System is fully functional and has 500 Mhz processor and 320 megs of RAM.

When I use a wireless Ralink PCMCIA wifi card, all works well for about 30 minutes with about 17-20% CPU, after which the CPU usage goes up to 100% and system slows down to a crawl. If I remove the card and shut down the Ralink software, the system goes back down to 2-5% CPU. Re-inserting the card and restarting the laptop does not solve the issue - jumps back up to 100% immediately upon card insertion. Putting in another PCMCIA card (LAN) creates the same effect - 100% CPU and dead crawl. After computer has been off for a while, all works well again.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to deal with this or what the issue might be, please let me know. It's getting really frustrating - machine is already slow enough, and this just completely kills it. Thanks for any information.

 

Could there be some internet access going on such as Windows update or Antivirus updates?. Mcaffee is notorious for causing this kind of CPU overload when it is auto updating itself. Try disabling antivurus and or windows auto updates and see if it solves it.

 

Also let windows manage the wifi card, could be the software that came with the card could be eating up cpu cycles.