Unexplained processor usage

[Stefan Dyk]

I have a Pentium 4 with 1 Meg of DDRAM and 2 x 80 Gig hard drives running
Windows XP Pro. Am connected to Internet via cable. Cooling fan speed is
variable depending on processor / heat load. Once or twice every week I hear
the fan speed wind up and find the processor working really hard - even when
the computer is supposed to be idling and NO programs are open. When this
happens the XP Performance graph shows Processor, Hard disk and Memory are
all being used near capacity. Doing what? Would appreciate suggestions
regarding
cause or remedy.
Stefan

 

[Chris Lanier]

again, if you hear something from inside the computer this newsgroup is not
the place to get help. contact the people who sold you the computer.

 

[Smile Extender]

When you look Task Manager, which processes are using lot of cpu?

 

[Steve]

Even with 1gb (I'm assuming its 1gb and not 1mb as that would be really
small) of ram, your computer still uses a swap file. If you installed
Windows and allowed it to set itself up, it is most likely using a heafty
chunk of your hard drive for this swap file, probably over 2 gb. At some
point, windows has to "swap" the contents of ram to the swap file to make
room for more information. In my experience and with only 512mb ram, my
system usually does it when I am idle. It is likely that it happens more
often than you are noticing and you just happen to catch it every now and
then. With today's smarter motherboards and bios configurations, the fan
speed getting faster is natural when the system dumps to the swap file as
the faster hard drive creates more heat while its working, the cpu creates
more heat as its working and the ram creates more heat as its working.

But, thats not to say there isnt something else going on in the background
so it is wise to check the task manager when you see this symptom happening.
It is also wise to maintain a properly configured firewall and virus
scanner. My firewall has caught numerous programs attempting to "phone home"
at times of high CPU utilization which tells me that the software companies
are getting smarter in their attempts to hide activities like that.

As a last resort, I have reformatted my drives many times to rid myself of
offending programs that say they have uninstalled only for me to find many
registry keys still present, and I actually had a program tell me it
uninstalled and I later caught it trying to "Phone Home" (3 days later)

My secret is to have 2 drives, Installing the OS and any applications on the
primary drive and keeping my data on the secondary drive. While it does slow
things down a bit, It keeps me from loosing any data when I have to
reformat.

 

[John Steele]

I have a Pentium 4 with 1 Meg of DDRAM and 2 x 80 Gig hard drives running
Windows XP Pro. Am connected to Internet via cable. Cooling fan speed is
variable depending on processor / heat load. Once or twice every week I hear
the fan speed wind up and find the processor working really hard - even when
the computer is supposed to be idling and NO programs are open. When this
happens the XP Performance graph shows Processor, Hard disk and Memory are
all being used near capacity. Doing what? Would appreciate suggestions
regarding
cause or remedy.
Stefan

I believe that XP will run some optimisation and defrag routines after it
has been idle for a period of time. Could it be these that are running. It
would explain the high level of disk activity.

 

[Alex Nichol]

I have a Pentium 4 with 1 Meg of DDRAM and 2 x 80 Gig hard drives running
Windows XP Pro. Am connected to Internet via cable. Cooling fan speed is
variable depending on processor / heat load. Once or twice every week I hear
the fan speed wind up and find the processor working really hard - even when
the computer is supposed to be idling and NO programs are open. When this
happens the XP Performance graph shows Processor, Hard disk and Memory are
all being used near capacity. Doing what?

Probably the Prefetch system doing a reorganisation of layout of files
on the hard disk, so as to speed up loading of the system and of
frequently used programs