Cpu Usage

[danjohadley]

Hello again, i need urgent help with this problem.

A while ago i posted in this forum asking for help about why my cpu usage was at 50% when the pc was doing nothing. A very helpfull person helped me find out more about this problem and we found out through process explorer that the usage was caused by hardware interupts.

Now in safe mode i get 0-5% cpu usage wich is fine, now when i boot normally this always is around 50-60%. Eventually we figured that it is probably a driver issue and i left it at that as i did not wish to reformat at that time.

Today i installed another hard disk into my pc a decided to fresh install a copy of xp onto that. After the installation was complete before i installed any drivers i checked the cpu usage, it was back up to around 50% while idle again. I checked safe mode and it went back down to 5%.

I have tried both normal Xp Pro and the x64 version.

I cannot determine the source of this problem and hope that because of it running fine in safe mode that it is not a hardware related problem.

My Pc specs are as follows :-

Amd Athlon 64 3700+
Asus A8N-SLI Premium
1gb pc3200 ocz Ram
BFG Nvidia 7900gt oc 256mb
80gb Sata Hd
580 Q-Tec Psu


Any Help will be greatly appreciated

Thanks
Dan


^^ sorry for any spelling mistakes in the above thread

[arthurleung]

Go into you bios and try disable SATA2,3,4 and IDE1 (I assume you have your dvd writer on IDE2), also disable silicon image sata.

I find that nvidia ide/sata driver likes to detect sata port like every millisecond or so which is quite annoying. (It stopped when I rack up and use up every single SATA port on the board)

[da_ging]

take a look at the task manager to see what process is causing the cpu usage

[danjohadley]

arthurleung i will try what you said thankyou.


da_ging thats the thing in proceses there is nothing taking up and cpu.

[danjohadley]

Right, i tried switching what sata port it was in, disabling all the ones it wasnt in, turning off the Sillicone Image ports, and the disused ide ports.

I really dont know what to do, its killing my computer its slowed right down.
I dont want to have to take it into my local pcworld where they will just reformat it and do a virus scan (which i have done btw).

Dan

[Baddriver]

Bring up task manager, look at the 'Processes' tab and sort by CPU usage. What processes are hogging the CPU?

[danjohadley]

There all at zero, except System idle processes which is at 98-99%.
Thats the problem, the cpu is at 50% but no process shows any usage

[TamDigital]

Have you tried unplugging all peripherals (with the exceptions of keyboard and mouse of-course)?

You can get a more accurate display of CPU usage by typing perfmon in the Run dialogue box from the Start menu.

[TamDigital]

Is your hard drive light flickering or constantly on while the CPU is so busy in idle?

[danjohadley]

Nope

[TamDigital]

Hopefully you have SP2 installed for XP?

Otherwise it must be DPC usage probably caused by a corrupt or incompatible device driver, try unplugging every peripheral you have, starting with USB devices and leaving the mouse and keyboard til last, see if it goes down after unplugging any one of them.

You should also try using your BIOS defaults if the above has no effect.

If those don't work, try disabling peripheral hardware one by one from within device manager checking CPU usage after disabling each one.

There is a program which will pinpoint the usage, I'll have a rummage and see if I can find out what it is... brb

[TamDigital]

Its called Kernrate (see http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...isplayLang=en). I'm going to download and try it myself on WinXP SP2 since it doesn't mention it will work on that.

[danjohadley]

OK i will try that thanks. How do i use KrView

[TamDigital]

OK i will try that thanks. How do i use KrView

Yeah, its a bit complex .

Anyway, I just came across this thread (http://forum.sysinternals.com/forum_...p?TID=837&PN=1) and it would seem you are far from being alone and its something to do with your nvidia drivers (videoport.sys to be precise). To confirm this, go into device manager, disable your graphics card, reboot, check cpu usage, it should not show the 50% usage. Re-enable the card and reboot, check its back to 50%. Its an incredibly long thread (34 pages) so I haven;t got to the cure yet, maybe you can before me?

[danjohadley]

well i really hoped that it would work, but it didnt. Sorry for making you read through 34 pages of stuff. Still at up around 40-60%

[TamDigital]

Ah, I didn't read it all. There was one who said they'd cured it ...

but yesterday I updated my drivers to:

6.86 nforce4 drivers from nvidia's site

91.33 beta forceware from nvidia's site

While my comp used to only go 20 minutes before 50% CPU usage, I haven't seen any issues since the update and my comp has run for ~30 hours straight.

But if disabling the card didn't solve it then its most likely not the problem. Did unplugging peripherals see the usage drop?

Something is causing unnecessary DPCs on your system, it has to be something that is using a driver if safe mode does see the same problem, its just a case of isolating it. Once isolated, we then look for a resolution.