Unidentified processes running on the computer

[Guest]

In the task manager the system idle process indicates usage of 96% - 99%. But
the status bar at the bottom of the task manager indicates CPU usage 83% -
87%. all the processses listed in the task manager that show any usage add up
to 100% with the the System Idle Process. The Task manager indicates 100% cPU
usage at least 96% of the time. Perfomance is also slow and ineffecient. I
have scanned the comupter for viruses and spyware several times but no
malicious software has been found.
Any help would be deeply appreciated.

 

[Claymore]

In the task manager the system idle process indicates usage of 96% - 99%. But
the status bar at the bottom of the task manager indicates CPU usage 83% -
87%. all the processses listed in the task manager that show any usage add up
to 100% with the the System Idle Process. The Task manager indicates 100% cPU
usage at least 96% of the time. Perfomance is also slow and ineffecient. I
have scanned the comupter for viruses and spyware several times but no
malicious software has been found.
Any help would be deeply appreciated.

Hello Warren,

You seem sure that nothing is using any appreciable amount of CPU, but
just to be sure:
In the Task Manager, click on CPU at the top of the column and then
click it once more. This should list the processes using CPU at the
top. Watch it for a while to see if anything intermittent is grabbing
CPU.

 

[JS]

You need to find the specific process or application that's taking all
the CPU resources and slowing down your PC.

To do this try Process Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Once you have Process Explorer installed and running:
In the taskbar select View and check 'Show Process Tree' and 'Show Lower
Pane' options.
(This will provide the detailed info you need)
Next click on the CPU column to sort processes by %CPU usage.
Then click on the process that's using most or all the CPU %,
once it's highlighted, right click and from the options listed select:
Search Online
This should display what out there on the web about that process.

Note: some entries like Explorer and svchost may need to be expanded to show
the detail,
(sub processes), in this case click on the + located to the left of the
entry.

Still another tool is What's Running
http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx

JS

 

[C J.]

In the task manager the system idle process indicates usage of 96% - 99%.
But the status bar at the bottom of the task manager indicates CPU usage
83% - 87%. all the processses listed in the task manager that show any
usage add up to 100% with the the System Idle Process. The Task manager
indicates 100% cPU usage at least 96% of the time. Perfomance is also
slow and ineffecient. I have scanned the comupter for viruses and spyware
several times but no malicious software has been found.
Any help would be deeply appreciated.

Take a closer look in your Task manager a moment, Which one of these
processes named "Image" seems to be using the most % of your CPUs cycle time
there? How much memory is allocated for it?

example:

Image User CPU Mem Usage
taskmgr Chris 02 4,140K

You said " all the processes listed... add up to 100%" so which runnng
process is using the largest portion of that 100% Is the image being Used
by the System, a Local Service, a Network Service - or you (Warren)?

 

[Guest]

I ran the Process Explorer and it identified what the Task Manager couldn't
show. It two process, Hardware Interrupts and Deferred Procedure Calls, two
categories without assigned PIDs. Hardware Interrupts are using 42% - 56% CPU
and Deferred Procedure Calls are using 25% - 40% CPU. This explains the
discrepancy in the Task manager. The WEB sites did not provide a lot of
clarity. I suspect that these usages are not correct. Any clues on how I
might resolve this?

 

[JS]

There seems to be a lot of DPC issues related to NVIDIA's Gforce 6800 series
video card, a lot of these users also had Dell PCs.
Below is a link to forum on this, specifically the final posts (there are 41
pages of post) on page 41:
http://forum.sysinternals.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=837&PN=41

JS