CPU usage jumping to 100% win7

[Iwke]

I've seen a few threads about similiar problems, however I think mine differs a little from the rest that's why I opened my own thread.

Here's the deal: My cpu usage jumps to 100% when I do usual actions like page refreshing, starting windows media player, starting task manager and so on. On the other hand when I'm watching let's say youtube it's on 4%-20%.

I have:
win7 professional 32bit
2GB of RAM DDR2
dual core 2ghz processor
Nvidia Geforce 7600 GT
According to microsoft my pc meets the requirements so I thought it might be the graphic card, I asked about it in graph card section and seems that should be enough as well.

I'm gonna guess the first question you will ask is what processes use most of the cpu, and the answer is the ones I actually use at the time (i.e. I refresh google chrome page chrome.exe uses a bunch of cpu.
This wouldn't be much of a problem but I play some video games as well that don't require much (warcraft 3 for example) and there this high cpu usage causes trouble.

I hope someone can help me thanks in advance I'll be checking daily so if anyone needs additional information just ask.

 

[Lemur]

A spike in CPU usage is not uncommon when starting some programs. If it stayed at 100%, then I'd be concerned. What does it settle down to?

 

[Iwke]

somewhere around 30% then slowly to around 10% thing is when I play game for example it keeps jumping to 100% frequently and I experience delay in both visual and command giving aspect.

 

[Lemur]

You don't have your system specs listed (please fill out). How much memory do you have. If 2GB, consider adding more and see if this helps. How many processes do you have running? You want to conserve your resources.

 

[Iwke]

I don't think memory is the issue since it rarely goes over half and seems to be quite stable, running chrome and task manager I have 39 processes running (all user list)

 

[Keiichi25]

Check your drivers would be the next thing. I know that if you are using the Baseline windows Drivers, you aren't going to get smooth performance. First the Video drivers, and maybe check your disk controller drivers. If they are the base line microsoft ones, I would look and see if there are updated drivers for both of them and try one of them to see if the problem still exists.

 

[logicearth]

The AMD Althalon 64 (3200+) is a single core processor correct?
There in lies the problem.

 

[Aphelion]

I don't think memory is the issue since it rarely goes over half and seems to be quite stable, running chrome and task manager I have 39 processes running (all user list)

Are you running virus/malware protection... it could also be a background process grabbing a bunch of CPU time.

Are you running a peer to peer network of any kind?

When playing a game I would normally shut down all other open applications.

Ap

 

[cluberti]

It would be wise to run resmon and watch the CPU tab to see exactly which process is consuming CPU when the issue occurs, at least for starters. All other suggestions here are good best-practices for performance as well, so heeding them is a good idea.

 

[mw2]

Same sort of problem on my PC...

I just end up using readyboost to put back up the performance...

 

[Iwke]

I'm gonna answer these 1 by 1:
-Yes my drivers are up to date.
-I double checked and yes I have a single core processor after all
-I tried running it with anti virus turned off same problem, I don't have any peer to peer connection.

So I guess logicearth was correct is there any way around this or I just have to buy a better processor to use win 7?

 

[cluberti]

Hard to say without knowing more about what's causing the CPU usage in the first place, and for how long it lasts. Is there anything specific you do regularly that seems to trigger it? Also, have you looked at resmon while it's occurring to see what process it's saying is utilizing the CPU at that time?

 

[Keiichi25]

I'm gonna answer these 1 by 1:
-Yes my drivers are up to date.
-I double checked and yes I have a single core processor after all
-I tried running it with anti virus turned off same problem, I don't have any peer to peer connection.

So I guess logicearth was correct is there any way around this or I just have to buy a better processor to use win 7?

Well, next step is running Task Manager and see what the top CPU Resource hogs are first to see what is spiking your processor to 100%. I haven't really seen anything on my system, even though it is a dual core, to even make it run at 50% doing what you are doing. It suggests to me there is some process trying to do something frantically for no good reason and short of a really intensive process, it shouldn't be hammering your system, even for a single core, for 100% just doing youtube.

Right now, as an experiment, I am on an XP machine with 1.5 gigs of ram, single processor (Yes, I know, it is not win 7), but at the moment, I have IE, firefox, Winamp, Outlook and Office communicator running at the moment, and going to youtube while Winamp is running. I am watching the CPU graph fluctuating between 46 to 80% CPU usage with Youtube going, but not 100% completely capped and no screen issues.

The only thing I have seen really slowly down systems (And yes, again in the XP time design) was when systems had high disk activity (Sometimes resulting from heavy virtual memory swapping due to having 512 meg of ram and lots of apps running)

The only thing I can suggest is to have task manager running and observing what processes are running and also watching your disk activity. Unfortunately, disk activity rarely coincides with the CPU usage, but does result in sluggishness in the system due to the system juggling writes and reads to disk for Virtual Memory handling and actual disk work and so the system slows down due to the disk being the slowest part of the system.

Again, the only way to narrow it down is having Task manager up and watching the processes, get the top key ones that are eating up your processing times and then finding out what they are doing.

 

[Iacob Adrian]

I had the same problem as you, the only thing that I could do was lowering the priority of the war3 usage from task manager from Normal to Low, and now it works fine.

 

[szoltan]

I recommend a SysInternals App called ProcMon (Process Monitor) for troubleshooting. Process Monitor.
Watch the 'The Case of the Unexplained' series Mark's Webcasts, cases of troubleshooting on windows sluggishness, malware problems with SysInternals tools.