Laptop is working hard but why!

cheekyminx

My laptop is about 2 years old and had a Centrino Pentium M 1.6Ghz with 512MB RAM, I noticed it being a bit slow and the fan is chugging away at full blast. I pressed ctrl alt del and it's shows this:





Why is System Idle Processes taking up so much of the CPU usage? At one point the total CPU usage was about 60% as you can see on the graph.

I hope it isn't a virus, I've got Windows Defender, Avast Antivirus and Zonealarm (free version) is that ok?

Please help! Thanks!!!

choosewisely

The system idle process is what % of the CPU time is idle so you want a high % really. On your task manager CPU graph try see which programs are using the CPU when it peaks as sometimes your CPU usage is up over 50% but on your screen shot of running processes the highest usage is 6% so you must have taken the screen shot when it had calmed down.

I'd check what programs you have running at startup (using MSCONFIG) and make sure your anti-virus software is up to date and check for spyware too (Grisoft AVG AntiSpyware or Spybot is good).

I've also seen quite a few PCs go slow after last weeks Windows updates were downloaded - is your PC set to automatically download updates and did you notice it slow down after any updates last week?

cheekyminx

choosewisely wrote: »

The system idle process is what % of the CPU time is idle so you want a high % really. On your task manager CPU graph try see which programs are using the CPU when it peaks as sometimes your CPU usage is up over 50% but on your screen shot of running processes the highest usage is 6% so you must have taken the screen shot when it had calmed down.

I'd check what programs you have running at startup (using MSCONFIG) and make sure your anti-virus software is up to date and check for spyware too (Grisoft AVG AntiSpyware or Spybot is good).

I've also seen quite a few PCs go slow after last weeks Windows updates were downloaded - is your PC set to automatically download updates and did you notice it slow down after any updates last week?

Thanks for the quick reply

It's set to download updates automatically, but asks me when to install. I did some a few days ago and it took about 20 mins to reboot as it stalled at the welcome screen during the automatic restart from the update. Have others had this same problem then??

My virus checker is set to download updates automatically and windows defender seems to get its updates through windows updates automatically. Will I need spybot or something on top of windows defender?

Stompa

There seem to be quite a lot of processes running, were you running many applications at the time?

Millionaire

Your I.E is using a huge amount of memory there. almost 100MB.

How many pages are you opening?

As Previous poster, run updates then scan your system including spyware scan, defrag and also check whats starting up.

Download and run the free Ccleaner to clear out any garbage thats clogging the system up and remove any programs in add/remove that you never use or will use.

choosewisely

I've seen quite a few PCs struggle to install updates since last weeks 'Patch Tuesday' including stalling at shutdown and restart.

Seems to have taken a good few days to actually get all the updates on but once they're on they seem to settle down again.

Still worth doing the other checks too though!

cheekyminx

Thanks I'm just checking everything to make sure everything is up to date!!

I closed IE and reopened it (only had two windows open - MSE and Windows Live Mail) to the same windows and instead of over 100MB it used about 40MB :silenced: