system idle

[plastick]

In my task manager, it says that my system idle process is taking up to around 98 percent of my cpu usage.
Now I have had nothing running for a while now, but I can still hear my stupid hard drive going clickity clack.

Whats the deal??

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Umm ... "You're being H4x0r3d"?

Any odd processes running in the background? High net activity?

- M4H

 

[conjur]

Garbage collection.

Any background virus checkers running?

Got Automatic Updates on?

 

[plastick]

What is H4x0r3d?

And in my task manager there are no other processes taking up more than 1% of cpu.
How can i check if there is anything runing "in the background?"

Very little network activity..only anandtech

 

[plastick]

it wont stop clicking!!!

 

[Matthias99]

Is the access light on the front of your PC flashing, or is it just clicking? Some drives just get noisy after a while...

 

[plastick]

no my hd light is blinking away. i can feel it in the gui too.. things are slightly laggy.
And the thing is still clicking. The only thing that is killing the cpu is the system idle process.

...stupid system idle process...

 

[RVN]

How much is the memory usage for system idle?

The high number for the system idle process indicates your reserve of the CPU not being used. This is normal. My 3.2 GHz P4 w/hyperthreading indicates a "99" with only the browser open.

If you're running XP and don't plan to use the restore points, try turning off system restore. You can disable "NTFS Disable Last Access Update" by editing your registry. Also, you might try turning off your Indexing service ...that's assuming you haven't already tried those things. There's alot of software that might cause frequent writing and reading of the hard drive ...like automatic defraggers, network scanners, registry trackers, anti-virus etc...(but you'd typically know that they were running).

IMO, if you can't isolate the activity with the hard drive, it might the beginning of an eventual HD failure.

 

[Matthias99]

This was happening on my girlfriend's computer when I installed GoBack on it -- it would thrash the hard disk constantly even if there was nothing going on. Make sure you're not running *anything* extraneous in the background, and that you don't have any viruses or spyware. Something could be using very little CPU time but still doing a lot of disk activity for some reason.

 

[plastick]

Most likely spyware. That stuff is horrible. We ghosted the machines yesterday and it stopped.