re: System Idle Process taking 95% of CPU
Sunday, November 3, 2002 at 9:12 am
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by C K
(6910 messages posted)
What are your system specs? Specifically the motherboard manufacturer and model.
Some motherboards have incompatibilities and have had to require replacement or
be returned to the manufacturer for modification. This has happened to me. In some
cases, a BIOS upgrade can be done to fix it. There were MB's identified by MS and
the vendors to be a problem. If you have one of those boards, the problem was that
their design was not completed for the final ACPI spec. In some boards the CPU usage
is being incorrectly reported. This can either involve a fix from MS or can be a
design problem in the motherboard which can not be fixed and involves installing
the Standard PC Hal which disables the ACPI. If it is a motherboard problem, you
will find that what works in NT 4, does not work in Win 2000 and XP. As I have written
before in this forum, the system idle process is also incorporated in other OP systems,
incuding MAC OS X, Linux, etc. If any of you have used software CPU coolers for
Win 9X, this is essentially all a software cooler is. It just adds the system idle
process. To date in all of the systems I have worked on (thousands of them), hardware
has been the cause for reported problems in the system idle process and high idle
CPU usage/sluggish response. Anybody having problems, send your specs to me and
I will research it for you. I am trying to compile a list of hardware that seems
to be causing this problem in 2000 and XP. As I said, if everything works OK in
NT4, and your CPU usage hangs high (30-60% while idle) under 2000 XP, (check it before
any other software is installed) expect that you have a hardware problem and I suspect
that your MB is 2 to 3 or more years older. If it is a new motherboard, (which I
haven't seen any to date) you may have to contact the MB vendor and tell them the
problem you are having. At that point both MS and the vendor will have to bump heads
and decide what the problem is and how to fix it. C K
On Sunday, November 3, 2002 at 12:46 am, Clifford wrote:
>No, I believe that Sabrina's problem is real. I have the same problem. When no processes
>are running, the idle process should indeed consume all the available processor
cycles.
>However this CPU time should not be accounted for in CPU usage on the performance
>tab, (otherwise it would always total 100%!).
>
>I my case, the only process logging time is the idle process, but the CPU usage
is
>high. It never goes below about 22% in XP (compared with about 2% on NT), and often
>goes much higher (60-70%), and the system becomes very sluggish.
>
>The idle process should be ready to relinquish CPU to active processes at any time.
>If you select "show kernel times" from the "view" menu in Task Manager, it indicates
>that almost all the CPU cycles are accounted for by kernel time.
>
>I can only imagine that this is a driver problem, but I have not located it, but
>the problem may have arisen after installing a USB ADSL modem, but I have not confirmed
>this yet.
>
>Clifford
>
>
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