System Idle Process in Win2k goin wiiiild...and standby problems...

[CheapJabroni]

Hey all,

I've had win2k for a couple weeks already and its doing greater than any OS I've tried..well, after a week of replacing my old trusty voodoo3 graphics and Diamond monster soundcard because those companies were bought out, meaning no new drivers. 🙁 However, being a 3d graphics student, I use 3d Studio Max a lot and when I'm using it for lengthy periods of time, my comp slows to a snails pace. I go to task manager and notice the "System Idle Process" is going amuck, bouncing around from 60 to 90 percent of the cpu usage unless I reboot. Does anyone know what's goin on?

Also, I'd like to save a little power by allowing my computer to go on standby when I'm not there, but when it does my comp freezes and I can't activate it again unless I shut down and turn the comp back on. Any suggestions?

Thanks alot for any help guys.

AMD Thunderbird 1.2
Abit KT7 Mobo
384 Megs of RAM
VisionTek Nvidia GeForce2 GTS
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound
Hauppauge Win TV Card
Ghetto Realtek Ethernet card

 

[bozo1]

60 to 90% CPU usage for "System Idle Process" means it is idle that amount of time. 99% means your system is almost totally idle.

 

[igiveup]

Which also means that you need to check the rest of your list to find out what other processes are making your system idle go nuts.

 

[CheapJabroni]

now that's odd...why would it go idle as I was using it?

 

[juiio]

Even if you're using your system, you're usually not using the full power of your processor.

 

[CheapJabroni]

but how does that relate to my system going idle...?

 

[rseraji]

when system idle process is high it means resources are free... you can also look to see what application is hogging up resources from the task manager list.. usually it should idle at over 95%, meaning using 5% resources.. mine idles at 99% even though i have a few mIRC sessions open

 

[CTho9305]

while you're in 3dsmax, unless you have lots of objects and are animating or rendering, the cpu will be mostly idle. once youre rendering or animating, expect almost 0% idle

 

[Nevo]

<< when system idle process is high it means resources are free... >>



No, no, no.

You need to understand that the processor is ALWAYS running SOME program. Most of the time, when the box is doing nothing, the system is running the Idle process, which waits for you (the user) to do something: move the mouse, type a key, etc.

When no other thread is in a runnable state, the scheduler has the idle process run on the processor.

High CPU time for the idle process is normal. If you look at the bar graph of CPU time, you'll see that idle time doesn't coun't as 'busy' time for the processor.

It does NOT mean your system has free resources! Other apps could be hogging memory and handles and whatnot, but if they're in a wait state (say, waiting for I/O to complete), the idle process will run, with resources tied up by other apps, until another thread becomes runnable, at which point the scheduler will schedule that thread to run on a processor.

Basically, if you're not doing anything, high CPU time on the Idle process is what you WANT.