System Idle Processes are taking up over 50% of my processing power!

[cheesehead]

Lately, my lapop seems to have been running a bit slower. Ad-Aware shows no spyware, and there's nothing odd in the system tray. However, it appears that "system idle processes" are taking up about 50% of my processing power at times; this does not go away when running games. Does anyone know why this is?
-Cheesehead,

 

[LatinJones]

The sytem idle process runs when the system is idle. Basically it's how much of your CPU IS NOT being used. Mine sits at 90-99% most of the time but I don't run many background apps.

You should be concerned that your system idle process is only at 50%....Try to figure out what processes are using up the other %50 of your processor. They are most likely the cause of your system slowness.

I just had another thought.. This might be caused by having a hyper-threaded CPU. Do you have hyper threading enabled?

The hyper-threading simulates multiprocessing so it could be that 1 processor is idle while the other is working on your other tasks...You still should look at the other processes running in the task manager and see if anything is eating up your CPU.

 

[cheesehead]

Originally posted by: LatinJones
The sytem idle process runs when the system is idle. Basically it's how much of your CPU IS NOT being used. Mine sits at 90-99% most of the time but I don't run many background apps.

You should be concerned that your system idle process is only at 50%....Try to figure out what processes are using up the other %50 of your processor. They are most likely the cause of your system slowness.

I just had another thought.. This might be caused by having a hyper-threaded CPU. Do you have hyper threading enabled?

The hyper-threading simulates multiprocessing so it could be that 1 processor is idle while the other is working on your other tasks...You still should look at the other processes running in the task manager and see if anything is eating up your CPU.

That's not quite what I meant. When not running any programs, the processor is running at 67% of max capacity, and 87% of that is System Idle Processes.
However, the problems seems to have gone away (for now) after increasing the Virtual Memory from 128mb to 1024/1530mb. Mind you, I have 1 GB of Corsair XMS PC3200 in there already, so who would have thought that was the problem?

 

[Nothinman]

Perhaps you mean the System process which is essentially the kernel, the System Idle Process is as LatinJones said, the absense of real CPU activity.

 

[Abzstrak]

Originally posted by: Cheesehead

Originally posted by: LatinJones
The sytem idle process runs when the system is idle. Basically it's how much of your CPU IS NOT being used. Mine sits at 90-99% most of the time but I don't run many background apps.

You should be concerned that your system idle process is only at 50%....Try to figure out what processes are using up the other %50 of your processor. They are most likely the cause of your system slowness.

I just had another thought.. This might be caused by having a hyper-threaded CPU. Do you have hyper threading enabled?

The hyper-threading simulates multiprocessing so it could be that 1 processor is idle while the other is working on your other tasks...You still should look at the other processes running in the task manager and see if anything is eating up your CPU.

That's not quite what I meant. When not running any programs, the processor is running at 67% of max capacity, and 87% of that is System Idle Processes.
However, the problems seems to have gone away (for now) after increasing the Virtual Memory from 128mb to 1024/1530mb. Mind you, I have 1 GB of Corsair XMS PC3200 in there already, so who would have thought that was the problem?

LMAO, thats what you get for thinking your smarter than the writers of the OS.... Windows needs virtual memory, you cant trick it into not using it without problems....