CPU at 100% (I know: like others)

Hi: First time poster, here. Like others, I'm having a difficult time understanding why my cpu usage reaches 100% so frequently in Windows 7 64-bit. I'm running several systems with this problem; the one I'm looking at at the moment is a Dell Latitude D830 (Intel dual core) laptop with 4gb RAM. I've looked through several posts in these and other forums but haven't really seen a solution. (If I've missed a solution somewhere, my apologies and please direct me to the correct page.)

Also: while in Windows XP the sum of the cpus usages of the processes was equal to the the stated cpu usage itself, Windows 7 shows a difference between these two figures. For example, in the screen capture I'm sending you, the total usage of all processes equals 15% while cpu usage equals 93%. How can I find which processes are draining the cpu without having to shut processes down one by one?

Thanks.

Well you can keep that window up til you see it hit 100% then look at the list (sort by CPU use).

First, check the box "Show processes from all users" because not everything running is being shown there. But also:

I think that the reason that the CPU% and the total of all the process% numbers don't match is because the actual performance data gathered for those numbers is changing all the time and depending on when the statistic is gathered for each item it may not reflect excatly what is going on at the moment it is displayed. (I think the default is once a second, pretty course, an eternity, in CPU time)

Also with several low % numbers there, they are all really like 2.4 and 3.567 and 0.52 So when added up the total is more accurate than all the obviously rounded off values shown in the list.

Acuracy could be improved but that would adversely affect the system, so they are only general indicators really.

But if there is a process taking up near 100% CPU it would probably show in the list if you show all processes...

There is also the "Perfomance monitor"/"Resource Monitor" on another tab. Go there and open up the CPU section, it will show everything that it using up CPU time currently, and from there you can drill in for even more information if you see something interesting.

I have found that issue is almost always the video drivers.. at least with ATI,.... I found a version that does not do it.. i then update to the latest.. if thet cause it I then go back...
I found that newest version: 9-11_vista64_win7_64_dd_ccc_wdm_enu does not cause the issue... before that it was the 9-7 version... 9-8, 9-9 and 9-10 caused the issue.