Hopefully this is a common problem

[Imbecile]

No matter what I may be doing on my computer, my CPU usage keeps jumping about 20%. I've been troubleshooting this all weekend using every spyware deletion tool and antivirus tool I can find, but nothing seems to be helping. The process on the task list that keeps rising by 20% is 'System'. If I'm just sitting at my desk watching the performance chart, it looks like this _/\_/\_/\_, very constant with those peaks being the 20% jumps in usage. This is causing any program I run to 'skip'.

Thanks in advance for any ideas you have that might be helpful to my situation.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

I suggest starting with the basics:

What OS?
What virus scanner (if any)?
What background apps are running?
Do you have any odd peripherals connected (eg, webcam, external hard/zip drive, etc)?

 

[LTC8K6]

Drive indexing?

 

[Imbecile]

OS is Windows XP
I used Adaware and Spybot to clear the spyware and Norton for antivirus.
They found a few things since I hadn't scanned in a while and removed them.
No apps are running - at least none under the Windows Task Manager under "applications"
An extra hard drive is all that might be considered an out of the ordinary peripheral. I disconnected the harddrive and the problem persisted, however.

 

[Imbecile]

Still baffled by this =]

 

[kuljc]

you should post which program is actually doing this.


also I'm assuming you updated your spyware stuff/avg stuff... have you tried runnning it multipul times to make sure something's not there.

 

[Imbecile]

Ah yes, which program is doing this? That is the million dollar question.

All I know is that the Process entitled "System" goes from 0% CPU Usage to 20% Usage every few seconds no matter what I'm running - even when I'm idle. If you'd like certain information about my pc specs not already mentioned, just let me know - I'll supply what I can.

 

[fisheye]

I've seen this twice before.

One time, it was happening on my dad's PC. When he turned on his printer, it went away. Seems like there was an item in the printer queue that was causing the problem.

The other time it happened on my PC. I forget the exact situation, but it went like this: I have 2 network adapters in my PC: a wireless card, and the onboard LAN which I connect to another PC in my room with a crossover cable. This happened when I first set up my system. When the onboard lan was enabled but not 'connected' in some way (I think the ICS wasn't set up right or something, 'cause I don't remember having the "network cable unplugged" message, it would cause my CPU usage to jump.

Both times the errant CPU usage was just listed under "System". What a pain in the butt to figure out

 

[Imbecile]

Agreed that this is a complete pain in the butt to figure out =] I was hoping to find similarities that other users have had with this issue, so thank you for that fisheye. Unfortunately, I've troubleshooted both of those issues and the beast remains.

LTC's indexing suggestion was a good one, so I turned off indexing on both my hard drives. I was extremely confident that this would fix the problem... but it did not! This is the most baffling thing I've ever dealt with on any pc. Keep the suggestions coming!

 

[Xtremist]

http://www.sysinternals.com/nt...freeware/procexp.shtml

This program should replace Task Manager immediately It can show you in greater details what's going on. Mess around with it for a bit. Having it be the System process kinda sucks though, but even if this doesn't help this problem, you'll love it in the future.

Other ones I use all the time from them:

Filemon
Regmon
TCPView