Discussion
May be worth downloading www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html see what is really going on.
But I wouldn't worry about it as it System idle is a good place for processor use
But I wouldn't worry about it as it System idle is a good place for processor use
Edited by Jinx on Saturday 24th June 14:57
jasandjules said:
Quite often I find it just runs almost at a standstill, and when I check the task manager it tell me System Idle is operating at 90-95% of the CPU power..
But when you look at performance, you'll see that the CPU is opersting at 1%, so the System Idle process is using 95% of the 1% that's actually being used.
jasandjules said:
I have Windows XP (fatal mistake, but hey ho).. Quite often I find it just runs almost at a standstill, and when I check the task manager it tell me System Idle is operating at 90-95% of the CPU power.. How do I stop that sod nicking all the processor power?
There actually has been a bug where the idle process can take a long time to respond when other processes want to use the CPU, but in most cases when the system is slow to respond but the cpu seems to be idle, it's because the system is waiting for something else. Swapping is a common favorite, so check the virtual memory commit charge relative to the physical RAM.
jasandjules said:
Ah, that seems right enough, as when I flick to the processor screen it is tootling along at 1% or so..
Green V8S, that sounds wonderful, do you offer a translation service on that??!!? :-)
Green V8S, that sounds wonderful, do you offer a translation service on that??!!? :-)
Three finger salute (cntrl+alt+del) pull up the Performance tab.
Bottom left is "Commit Charge(K)" and over to the right of it "Kernel Memory (K)".
In lay terms the Commit Charge is the total amount of RAM the system has got both physical and swap space so if it'll go up when stuff is open and running... should go down when your not doing anything.
Often Windows bogging itself down is because it's doing programmed to do silly stuff when idle and not in use (tidy up memory & Page to disk or vice versa, defrag, etc.) often it doesn't instantly respond when you try to do something as you've caught it on the hop.
Obviously if the memory useage is creaping up constantly you need to look at what your system is running as something has a memory leak (keeps allocating itself more memory) or see if it always goes slow after using application 'X' as it could be the application isn't freeing up memory when it unloads so Windows eventually has a hissy fit when you open/close it multiple times (I remember an old version of Office was a swine for that, most MMORPG clients are also known to be rather untidy with it).
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