System Idle Process??

glimmer

Member
Jan 29, 2001
25
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Sometimes when I boot up my desktop my hard drive goes into a mode of turning on and off. It will go on for about half a second and then off for about half a second over and over again for about 5-8 minutes. I am running W2K on an Asus P3-V4X with a P3-550 and 256MB RAM. This happens maybe once or twice a week.

When I look in the Windows Task Manager I see the System Idle Process fluctuating up and down betwen 99 and 92 in the CPU Usage column. While this is happening, other system functions are slightly slower to respond including applications and the mouse. I shut down the computer normally 99.9% of the time and don't notice a relationship of this annoyance with those rare times that the system is shut down abruptly.

Any suggestions?
 

Cyph3r

Senior member
Jan 20, 2000
790
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The "System Idle Process" is what indicates how idle your system is, if it fluctaues from 99 to 92, then some other process is taking 7% of the cpu usage. You can ignore the "System Idle Process" and when this happen, scroll down on the task manager process list and you'll see another process there taking about the 7% cpu (or whatever it is from the idle process). It is this process that you should focus on.

I've also experieced this sometimes on my W2K installation, it seems it's writing some file or updating some internal file..it's usually harmless and once it finishes the machine will work normally..so I wouldn't worry too much about it..Regards