I consider myself to be pretty with it for techie stuff, but my machine is behaving so wildly. I swore it had a virus, but couldnt find any traces of it. Used Malwarebytes, AVG, nortons, Prosuite, Combofix...you name it. cant hunt the thing down, and then I saw that whatever was being scanned it was skipping over my pictures and documents as "locked" files. now, I can see my photos, but none of the antivirus stuff was scanning in there. I tried running as Admin, but it did the same thing. Frequently the CPU would speed up to be 95% usage! no programs were running, and yet there it sat revving away. it would stop after a minute, but it should NOT be doing that.

I pulled ALL my documents, pictures and so on, onto a thumb drive and then I restored my computer back to out of the box condition. I have reinstalled the OS and have done ALL the updates. I put Proscan suite back on it, because I really like it. I have run Malwarebytes and so on, and it shows clean, but my CPU is still doing the run away thing. not nearly as often, but its still at it. I dont have a single photo or document back on this machine yet, so if it was something hiding in the photo/doc files it hasnt even touched the USB port let alone had any time to reload itself.

Ideas? suggestions? hints? tips? tricks? I cannot afford to take this thing to a shop. Its a quad core processor running Windows 7 with all updates in place. I have a terrabyte HD so no worries there. im just so frustrated that I have this fancy machine, and it runs like an old worn out junker. Any advice or tricks would be appreciated.