Greetings --
Break out a dictionary and look up the word "idle," sometime. ;-}
The "System Idle Process" metric is the amount/percentage of time that
your CPU has *nothing* to do. A reading of 98-99% is generally
considered a good thing, and readings above 90% are normal. Think of
it like a car's engine idling in your driveway before you place the
car in gear.
If your System Idle process is logging percentages as low as 70%,
something else is severely bogging down your CPU. Primary suspects:
any other process(es) using more than 2 or 3%; any process(es) (other
than System Idle) pulling more than 10% is almost definitely a
problem. Odds are that you'll find that one or more of the
Svchost.exe processes are involved. It's perfectly normal to have
several instances of Svchost.exe running simultaneously.
A Description of Svchost.exe in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q314056
However, if Svchost.exe is using a large portion of your CPU
cycles, it has most likely been "hijacked" by a worm, Trojan, or
scumware. Have you tried using a decent antivirus application with
the most currently-available virus definition files? A strong
candidate would be W32.Welchia.Worm.
W32.Welchia.Worm a.k.a. W32/Nachi.Worm
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.welchia.worm.html
Because many of the newer viruses and worms can disable antivirus
applications whose definitions weren't up-to-date, try using one or
more of the free on-line scanners to double-check your system.
Trend Micro - Free online virus Scan
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
McAfee Security - FreeScan
http://www.mcafee.com/myapps/mfs/default.asp
Symantec Security Check
http://security.symantec.com/ssc/home.asp
Additionally, there are countless varieties of scumware (adware or
spyware) that could be consuming your CPU cycles. Most antivirus
applications do not scan for or protect you from adware/spyware,
because, after all, you've installed them yourself, so you must want
them there, right?
To deal with issues caused by any sort of "adware" and/or
"spyware,"such as Gator, Comet Cursors, Smiley Central, Xupiter,
Bonzai Buddy, or KaZaA, and their remnants, that you've deliberately
(but without understanding the consequences) installed, two products
that are quite effective (at finding and removing this type of
scumware) are Ad-Aware from
www.lavasoft.de and SpyBot Search &
Destroy from
www.safer-networking.org/. Both have free versions.
It's even possible to use SpyBot Search & Destroy to "immunize" your
system against most future intrusions. I use both and generally
perform manual scans every week or so to clean out cookies, etc.
Additionally, manual removal instructions for the most common
varieties of scumware are available here:
PC Hell Spyware and Adware Removal Help
http://www.pchell.com/support/spyware.shtml
Bruce Chambers
--
Help us help you:
You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on
having both at once. - RAH
Hus said:
It has tooken at least 5 minutes just to open this page. In task
manager one process is taking up 100% of the cpu usage making it near
to impossible to do anything. At the moment "system idle process" is
taking up 98% of cpu. Before it was explorer.exe then it was waol.exe
so i cant even use the internet properly some one please help, and i
was told reinstalling the whole system does not help.
