I had an old HP computer that had a pentium ~233 processor in it with 128Mb memory. I was running two four port ethernet cards on the box. The power supply finally died on it and I decided to upgrade the hardware since this router is a core router. On the old HP, I was running around 10 percent CPU usage on average.

Because this was an emergency failure, I went to a local box store and bought an off the shelf e-machine that has an AMD 1.8Ghz processor and 256Mb memory. I took the hard drive out of the HP and put it in the emachine. It booted up fine. The only thing it didnt do was recognize the on-board ethernet port. This wasn't a problem because I didn't need it with the other 8 ports I had available.

However, now the CPU stays > 80 percent most of the time and will sit at 100 percent for a great portion of time. This seems to be service affecting because it slows down everyone on the router.

Why would this hardware change make the CPU run so much harder?

My friend had this exact problem last week... he's sleeping now so I can't ask him but I believe he said he had to delete and re-add the ip addresses to the interfaces. If you try this take a supout first and afterwards so there is a way for support to figure out why.

Sam

Hmm.. OK. I'll give that a shot. The box is 150 miles from here so I'll have to be careful and try not to lock myself out.

here is what he said fixed it:

"I went to the bios and disabled all usb, unused serial, printer ports, and set the "reset ecsd" then booted. High CPU went away afterward." I was mistaken about disable/enable ips.

Yeah.. the IP thing didn't work. I'll give that a shot and see if it resolves the CPU issue.