hello
I was having problems with 100% cpu usage & at the Microsoft site they specified to install the patch to overcome the problem & i did. Now System idle Process shows 100% cpu usage. Please give the solution at the earliest.
Thanking you.
Mehul

What processes are you running.

Check taskmgr.

Processors have to be doing something all of the time. Regardless of active tasks or not - they have to be busy so they created the idle process thread. The idle process is really the balance of all other tasks up to 100%

it just means the processor is doing nothing..as you run other apps you will see it dropping down from 100%....I would get worried if it were running at 0% as then you would have problems. It just means it is 100% idle.

I have a similar question. My usage shows
100% for the idle process, but I also hear
tons of disk access going on in the background.
Is it a problem of swap space? There is 450MB of
swap space on 3 different logical disks. This
should be enough.

Thanks for your help.

While they may seem accurate, it is unlikely that they are correct. I get the same problems sometimes. The only thing running is Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer yet everything is responding slowly, e.g. navigating to a different local directory, etc. When I look at TaskMan and sort by CPU usage the System Idle Process is 90+% yet no other processes are taking up more than 1%. When processing speed returns to normal the System Idle Process is back down to around 5%. There must be something else going on in the background that is not registering.

Any ideas?

My system idle process is at on average 80%, however, the CPU usage meter shows it at 90-100 used all the time :S, I think the people at microsoft had no idea what so ever about what they were doing, but that's really no suprise :D,

hope someone can figure out what all this means,

Reece,

I see the same symptoms, constant disk activity, slow response but cpu usage on task manager very low.
I turned off xp's file indexing but saw no change.
The only unusual thing in my system is a 120gb ntfs partition. I noticed these problems when free space dropped below ~48gb.
Any more ideas?

i have the similar problem, but my usage is jump from 0%-25% when i did nothing, does anyone knaow what happen?

IT DOES NOT MATTER, THE CPU SHOWS 100% USAGE BECAUSE THE IDLE PROCESS SIMPLY USES UP 100% OF THE CPU, NO MATTER WHAT PROGRAM YOU RUN IT USUALLY TAKES UP 100% OF THE CPU, WHICH IS WHY PROGRAMS REQUIRE SLOWER CPU SPEED RUNS FASTER ON FASTER CPU.

I have the same problem but i cannot play games cause of the 100% cpu usage when i play... In windows sometimes my computer acts as if it has 50mhz. I have a p4 1.9ghz with 256 ddr ram

Could u tell me mehul which file u mean?
(could u write url plz?)

That stupid system idle process is always cranking, slowing down printing, and whatever.

The disk almost always getting accessed, it sucks.

Windows sucks.

Windows XP sucks.

I want my money back.

I only have problems when I start my computer.It takes about a minute before things start reacting,very annoying,thereafter things run pretty well (windows xp 866,256)

I had this problem where Norton System Doctor was registering 100% CPU Usage pretty much all the time.
Turn out to be W32.HLLW.Bymer.
Everything went back to normal after deleting Bymer files.

The 100% CPU usage is nothing to be concerned about. It will never interupt your normal usage of the CPU... It will only reach 100% if you are not using the CPU with other tasks...

Here is an Article I found on the Microsoft Database

http://support.microsoft.com/directory/article.asp?ID=Q263201

Good luck!
Leandro

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.

Good Luck!

I think that some of you may be talking at cross purposes.

I have a major problem with my brand new system which intermitently runs jerkily. When it is playing up, Task Manager shows the CPU usage graph spiking at 100% every 5 seconds and the list of processes shows that the spike is caused by 'System' hogging the CPU. In the intervening seconds 'System Idle Process' shows 98ish which is to be expected. So, my problem, and I suspect some of the others who have posted above, is what is causing the System itself to hog all the CPU, leaving the rest of the processes to struggle? When it is behaving itself, the CPU usage graph remains around 5%.

I am having the same problem, but with a twist. I recently put my computer together using a bare bones system and 800EB pentium chip I purchased last year. The motherboard reads my 800EB/133, as a 300/66 in bios, and 400/66 in bootup and windows. I've d/l'd intels processor frequency ID and it tells me that i do have an 800eb/133 and it's only running at 400/66. If I change the values of the chip in Bios to a higher number, it won't boot up, anything lower and i still get 400. So with that said, everytime i open a game, IE, or even a hard disk, the cpu usage jumps to 100%, if it is a game, it stays at 100% making it impossible to play. Yes i've updated the bios, yes the motherboard is compatible. There is 512K/100 ram. If I can't get the cpu speed up to 800, atleast help me stop it from hitting 100% usage.

Some of you guys talked about a problem where windows shows 100% CPU use with System Idle Process... That is completely normal. The CPU always has to do something, else it is OFF!

Others mentionned the hard-disk cranking thing... this is ALSO normal : XP has a background utility that moves most-used files to the center of your hard-disk every three days. This makes applications load faster. Obviously, it does this when you are not using your computer : that is, when the Idle Process is running 100% CPU time!

Same problem, except that IE and downloads hang all the time. The XP system is on a laptop connected to a router connected to a DSL modem. My other PC is running 2K, no problems blinding web performance. It is all DHCP & NAT, so I have to assume it is the sucky performance of XP Home.

Dell P4 1G, 128, W2k
When rendering files, spike from 0 to 100% CPU on graph between app process and sys.idle every 2 seconds.
I get a nice sine wave on the graph. Is this normal?

I think the people saying this problem is normal are not experiencing what the rest of us are. I'm running 2000 Professional on a Dell Latitude. The task manager shows 90-99% System Idle Process and the hard disk is spinning continuously and noisily. It's really annoying. Doing other tasks, like writing this, makes no difference. I bet a reboot will kill it but I don't want to do that every 5 minutes.

Sometimes I experience a problem with windows98 where I notice games chugging more than usual when the action gets dense (Medal of Honor) on my 1.2 ghz (running at 900) 512 meg sdram system w/ a 64 meg radeon VIVO card. I re-installed memturbo II, and discovered that something is taking 100% system processing which is NOT RIGHT in win98. The only way to fix this problem is to to reboot. Why does this process load occur? Is there a program that can determine which processes (ALL processes, kernels, etc.) are taking up how much of the cpu so I can diagnose where the issue is? thanx

I have uninstalled the indexing service on XP and my pc is running beautifully again - thanks to Jason (response 16 above)

I am running Win2000Pro on a P3 450 system w/ 512MB RAM. I have 100% CPU usage just using a browser (was Netscape 4.7x, then I switched to IE thinking Netscape was the issue, but the problem remains). IE will max out the CPU, then of course pages will stop loading until it works thru all its cycles. I uninstalled indexing (see post16 and 24 above), but I still have the problem (but then, mine is a CPU prob on Win2K, not a disk prob on XP).

Most common apps I use are IE, Palm Desktop, Quicken, Word, and AIM. I'm on a small home network w/ DSL. I'll pay cash to anyone who can solve this one... it's driving me nuts.
thx,
Jim

I thought it was idle process on mine but that was just a symptom, it turned out that for some reason Fastfind.exe was banging on almost continuously and the hardware calls were locking up processor use A LOT.

Wow

I had the lag problem (sluggish, whatever...) driving me nuts. Just uninstalled indexing service (per #16's instructions) and seems to have cured it.

Thanks!