Abnormally High CPU Usage

Ever since installing Ubuntu 7.10, the CPU usage in Vista has been absurd. First time booting into Vista after installing Ubuntu and CPU usage was at 100% yet memory consumption was around 600MB. I hard-rebooted and it appeared the problem was solved, but just now I am on again and this time it was not an issue from the moment I entered Vista, but about a half-hour later when I started noticing some lag. My HDD is clean, I've defragmented it over the past weekend, ran CCleaner, and right now am manually running a virus scan and spyware scan with AVG Antivirus and AVG Antispyware.

I dont think this problem is with Vista. I think its some small thing I didnt do 100% right in installing Ubuntu. Why else would there be two options for Vista in the GRUB, with the first one leading to the VAIO Recovery Center like I just lost Vista?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.


EDIT: In midst of this post, CPU usage dropped to 4%, memory consumption back up to normal, around 700MB. This puzzles me and is quite alarming.

 

Did you run task manager to see what process or processes were hogging the CPU?

Gary

 

The install of another OS on a different partition should not affect Vista at all. I dual-boot my laptop, the Vista recovery partition appears for me too. The GRUB loader found the partition and listed it as a boot option, just like it's supposed to. It was always there but Windows hid it from you.

So, as the guy with the huge name said, check the process list. There's probably a process going haywire. Perhaps the search function is indexing your whole computer or something.

Greg.

 

I tried but the processes kept fluctuating. So I tried killing the processes consuming the most memory and it helped a little...a while later the CPU settled down.

Thats some good information to know about the Vista recovery partition. I just completed both virus and spyware scans...some traces were found in the spyware scan, and no viruses found. I optioned for the traces in the spyware scan to be deleted.

Right now I am running some cleaning operations (disk defragment, CCleaner) and will reboot to see how it is.

 

Just rebooted and CPU usage is back up to 100% again. Task manager is unresponsive and this is getting very frustrating and irritating.

 

How do you tell which processes are eating up the CPU? I tried arranging it in the Task Manager but the numbers keep changing. Anyway it appears Windows Explorer repeatedly comes up to the top, as well as one SVCHost.exe.

EDIT: System Idle Process is eating up over 90% of the CPU.

 

Click on the column to sort by. Mem Usage or CPU. That's how it is on XP anyway, not sure about Vista.

 

Look, I'm a newbie so there's a fair chance what I'm about to say is just plain wrong...

About a month ago, my computer was running fine and then almost overnight it started running at 100% CPU. Even shutting down everything down via msconfig (Diagnostic Startup) had no effect.

In the end, I took it to pieces out of sheer boredom and cleaned it out - especially the fans and heat sinks and presto! Worked perfectly ever since. Dont know why (unless there's some kind of thermal throttle control on my P4), but who cares...?

 

sounded like u have a virus scan at startup. I would recommend get into safe mode and review all ur startup processes and services again

cheers ...

 

Maybe Vista indexing is running in the background? could be it's trying to index the large amount of data since you installed Ubunto. But still, it shouldn't take that much CPU usage.

 

Go to sysinternals.com and get a copy of process explorer. It is like Task Manger on steroids. It can look inside an instance of SVCHost.exe and see which service is actually eating the CPU. It will shed a lot more light on the situation.

Gary

 

Ok, in the case of Explorer, it might be a badly behaving shell extension. (even something as simple as something that adds a few entries to the context menu when you right click on a file)
svchost might be anything. If you google around a bit, there are tools that can tell you which services are contained in each svchost process, which might provide a few hints. (I can't remember the name of the tool off-hand, so you'll have to google it)
Idle is just what it says. That's not CPU usage, it just counts how much CPU time goes unused. (In your case, the CPU is idle 90% of the time, which doesn't really sound like "high CPU usage" to me.

So are you sure it's CPU usage that's the problem?

There is. That might have been it.
Come to think of it, the thermal throttle might not even be necessary. On my old AMD (before Athlon 64), I noticed the same kind of symptoms when it got really hot (which it did often because it was so noisy I usually just threw my jacket over the case to dampen the sound )

So yeah, it might be somerthing overheating.

Other than that, I'd guess it might be a Vista update that occasionally triggers this.

 

I've downloaded Process Explorer and it is showing "System Idle Process" to be taking up over 95% of the CPU.

 

vaio2k7,

You must not have read jalf's reply. So, I will reiterate what was said.

That means only 5% of the processor is being used. There is no "System idle process" per se. That is a placeholder in task manager and process explorer to tell you what percentage of the CPU is unused.

Gary

 

I see that the Process Explorer is showing that over 90% of the CPU is idle, but it still doesnt explain why when I open the Task Manager, the CPU usage shows 100%, and the computer is a little slow to respond at times. This is the first time something like this is happening and I just cannot figure it out...no viruses, no spyware, disks are clean, defragmented.

 

Lets go back for a moment. Task Manager cannot be showing 100% use and System Idle Process at 95% at the same time as the first two quotes above seem to say.

When you open task manager and it is showing 100%, the System Idle Process, by definition, will be 0%. The sum of other process use % will be 100.

When you first boot up how long does task manager show 100% use? Try rebooting and instead of starting task manager to see the % start process explorer instead.

Gary

 

Ok I will reboot and open the Process Explorer to see what happens...but the thing is that sometimes there is abnormal behavior and then sometimes its just normal...which is even worse because now its unpredictable.

 

I've rebooted, and the system is horrendously slow. This is ridiculous. Trying to find a process through these programs is not helping. The process consuming most % of the CPU is always changing. Sometimes its the Process Explorer itself, sometimes its a svchost.exe process. I really see no alternative than to perform a clean install right now. However concerns about that will be if I will still be able to have the software for the fingerprint logon.

This issue has never come up on any computer I have ever used until this, and it happened immediately after installing Ubuntu.

 

did you check the fans and heat sink? I would before you do a clean install and nothing happens...

 

vaio2k7,

I would expect it to jump around, however aren't you able to discern a bit of a pattern as to what process is using it the most? Or one that keeps jumping to a high number repeatedly?

I can't see how installing another OS on another partition would affect this Vista instance.

Gary

 

I am in Vista now and its all fine...like nothing has ever happened before. This is so unusual....however in past whenever I opened the Task Manager, I could see that the Task Manager itself was consuming most of the CPU. When I booted into Vista and first thing I did was open Process Explorer, "System Idle Process" was often at top, and then "Process Explorer" and some svchost.exe were top consumers of the CPU.

I really dont know what to do.

 

i just now did a reboot,but before windows explorer or internet explorer was around 50% usage.the fan was on and everyting.i did do a spy check and got rid of some spyware,but that didnt help and at the time i was only running vlc player and that was doing around 20%.but i did a restart and everthings okay.

i do have the laptop on almost 24/7 most days. maybe it just needed a reboot

 

System Idle Process SHOULD be at the top! It means that your system is mostly idle. I am not sure how many ways we can explain to you that System Idle Process is not consuming the cpu cycles. It shows how much is NOT being consumed.

When you say Task manager was consuming most of the machine what do you mean by "most"? What percentage? Saying most, doesn't give us ANY clue how much use real numbers.

Gary

 

I understand that System Idle Process should be at top, but my system was still lagging noticeably. When Task manager or Process Explorer were opened, they climbed to the top, about 60-70% CPU usage...a short peak up to 80% when first opened, then hovering around 60-70% range. When task manager closed, in the process disappeared in Process Explorer, and same when vice versa.

 

Something else to notice is that whenever I perform an operation, instead of the circular thing that sits next to the mouse cursor while the application opens or executes, I see the "hourglass" of previous Windows OS's. Now why is this?