re: System Idle Process taking 95% of CPU
Monday, November 25, 2002 at 12:10 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Wim Kotze
(3 messages posted)
hello CK,
I'm sending you my specs. I'd be very thankful if you can check it out - good luck
with your research anyway.
I am using an LG with AMD Duron processor (1 GHz) with 128Mb RAM on XP. I am experiencing
a classic System Idle process slowdown, as described by other users on this forum
(around 75% idling, 95-100% when opening a new page or folder in explorer or iexplore.exe).
I installed XP upon purchase, the disk is not fragmented, and to the best of my knowledge
virus free. I played around with paging options, "best performance" options etc but
to no avail. I've had my pc since February. Allthough I'm pretty sure this pc has
never been quick (my similar spec pc at work is only using 4% CPU on idling, with
loads of open applications!) I am not certain how much the problem has actually gotten
worse, if it has.
Do you think this is hardware? Any ideas?
regards
Wim
On Sunday, November 3, 2002 at 9:12 am, ckrokit wrote:
>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
>
>
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