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    Odd WinXP SP3 behavior: 90+ System Idle Process - but constant 50% CPU Usage?

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by nemt, Jun 14, 2011.

  1. nemt

    nemt Notebook Deity

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    Any idea what might be causing this? I've been messing around with my older Windows XP machine which I rarely ever use - and I've noticed performance has been really terrible, even for 2002 hardware.

    If the CPU Usage is so high all the time - how could the System Idle Process be up towards 100%? Shouldn't it be whatever's left over? It feels like something is really wasting resources and the system can't detect it.

    I'm fairly certain there's no malware on the PC. It's very rarely used - and when it is it's behind a hard firewall (I've run a full virus and malware scan as well with no hits).

    There isn't anything out of the ordinary from what I can tell in msconfig for startup services/processes or anything in the task manager (and everything in Task Manager reports 00 CPU usage).

    I'm reasonably certain it's a software problem, but here are the system specs anyway:
    Pentium 4 3066mhz
    1gb PC1066 rdram
    Radeon HD 4650 (agp) - the only component I've upgraded over the years, this card is a POS though and has never worked as well as the card it replaced, a 9800XT
    Asus P4T 533-C mobo

    EDIT: I've also double checked and the Hard Disk isn't in PIO mode - I know that can be a big system performance killer on older machines.

    EDIT 2: Added a hijackthis log
     

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    nemt, Jun 14, 2011
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  2. JOSEA

    JOSEA NONE

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    Thanks for adding the HiJack file, I do not see anything obvious there that would cause the initial issue, Does XP have indexing and if so do you have that turned off?
    Also, IF you create a new profile and login 'fresh' do you still get awful performance?
     
    JOSEA, Jun 17, 2011
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  3. nemt

    nemt Notebook Deity

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    Windows Search 4 + Indexing did give me a noticeable performance hit when I first set it up, but it wasn't 50% CPU usage level, it mostly just hung a little more on bootup. Very rarely are new files added to the system so I doubt it could be indexing much these days - I've tried killing all the index/search related services in task manager and still have half my CPU being eaten.
     
    nemt, Jun 18, 2011
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  4. nemt

    nemt Notebook Deity

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    Going to sound totally nutty, but I think I've fixed it:
    I did some more searching on Google for people with similar hardware possibly experiencing similar problems.

    Turns out newer Radeon cards rigged for AGP instead of PCIe have some issues with HDMI audio eating CPU time - but my card doesn't even have HDMI-out and didn't install any kind of HD audio driver. I did, however, find "Microsoft UAA Bus Driver for High Definition Audio" in my device manager.

    Disabling it appears to have fixed everything /:
     
    nemt, Jun 18, 2011
    #4