System Idle In Xp

[bluebear]

My XP recently crashed and had to take it to a repair shop to try and save the OS and data. The data was saved but in repairing windows all the programs had to be reinstalled.

Now it seems that system idle constantly runs and is anything from 15% of CPU time up to 80%. is it just me or is this waaay too high. I dont remember seeing it that high before XP went down. Its also doesnt seem to be working as well as before ( got a laptop with Pentium M 1.6Gh and 512MG Ram. )

I am really tempted now I have a back up of all my data to put in the ACER recovery disk and reinstall XP and start again. Worth it?

cheers

[Mid]

system idle means exactly that ,

ie the amount of available idle processor power ,

therefore high numbers are good .

[bluebear]

it seems to be an inverse relationship with my laptop! when idle is high it seems to take a long time to do things like open a new program.

[Naam]

system idle means exactly that ,

ie the amount of available idle processor power ,

therefore high numbers are good .

= bullsh*t² ! ideal is CPU load = 0 (zero)

[Naam]

system idle means exactly that ,

ie the amount of available idle processor power ,

therefore high numbers are good .

I'm Not A Complete Idiot Some Parts Of Me Are Missing!

no additional evidence required

[Simmo]

it seems to be an inverse relationship with my laptop! when idle is high it seems to take a long time to do things like open a new program.

Sounds more like you have low free memory and XP is paging out to disk.

[Tywais]

system idle means exactly that ,

ie the amount of available idle processor power ,

therefore high numbers are good .

= bullsh*t² ! ideal is CPU load = 0 (zero)

Sorry Dr, he is correct in this case. The system idle process is unique in this and displays available cpu usage (in other words, it displays the % the computer is in idle mode). Bring up Task Manager with no other processes and you will see it at around 99%. As more process actively run, this number drops and the active process cpu usage goes up. This from the Microsoft web site.

"This process is a single thread running on each processor, which has the sole task of accounting for processor time when the system isn't processing other threads. In Task Manager, expect this process to account for the majority of processor time."

As for other's problems, check that indexing is turned off. Here is a post on another forum.

"So I had the issues as others describe - 100% CPU utilization/System Idle Process, and a hard drive that WOULD NOT stop churning and churning and churning in WinXP. This is what I did to (so far) resolve it...

It must have happened after I decided to run Windows Catalog from Start/Programs, but who knows... Anyway, go to Add/Remove Programs / Add/Remove Windows Components/Indexing Services. UNINTALL IT!

I now have had a nice quiet hard drive for a few hours. Hope it stays that way. I was very close to a reformat."