what is a good monitoring program to help find my mysterious high cpu usage?

[VirginiaDonkey]

My CPU usage bounces anywhere from 25-80% when idle. when I play something on windows media player it drops to ~10% usage. I am using win98 so I have tried to isolate it using task manager with no luck. I thought maybe my hardware monitor was the culprit so I d/l another cpu usage tool with the same results.

seems kind of bass ackwards to me.

any Ideas?

Also, what is the approx cpu usage hit for using onboard sound compared with PCI sound card?

The reason I am asking this stuff is I am trying to minimize my frame loss during game play. with my current rig, I should be able to play UT with no problems at all, and I can until I get into a scene where there are 8-10 people then I start dropping frames. And I am not running at highest quality settings either

my rig

FIC AZ11E mobo (KT133)
Duron 1ghz@1.2
384mb pc133 ram
on-board sound
Radeon LE- hacked and o/c

Thanks in advance
gotey

 

[bacillus]

hmm, have you tried ending one program at a time when using ctrl-alt-del & monitoring cpu usage?

 

[VirginiaDonkey]

yep, that what I was doing. got everything closed except
explorer
rundll32
ptsnoop

still showing 25-80%

I may be barking up the wrong tree with the dropped frames, my vid card may be starting to crap out but I got to isolate it somehow, and this seems the easiest way to go

 

[bacillus]

what's ptsnoop??

 

[wedi42]

<< what's ptsnoop?? >>



it looks like a virus

that might be your answer

edit:
It should be noted that software packages for certain modems contain PTSNOOP.EXE files, but these are not trojans

 

[TheLeviathan]

I am having the exact same trouble. 50% to 80% idle and now that I am running a few apps(internet explorer) it has dropped to 49% but should be ALOT lower. TryProcess Explorer to see all services running on your machine. I am using it now but still don't see the "mystery" app sucking all CPU cycles. If you find the prob, please let me know. Thanks