Problem with CPU usage, plz help

My computer has been running kinda slow lately. I turn off auto protect and make sure that nothing else is running, and when I go into the task manager, CPU usage is constantly jumping from 3-7% to 35-40%. I just ran a virus scan and there aren't any viruses. I don't know what's up with any of this. Is it normal for the CPU usage to jump around like that?

I just upgraded from to 512 sticks of RAM to 2X1gb so I would expect it to be running faster.

 

In task manager, go to the processes tab and sort it by CPU usage. You will be able to read off which application is causing the CPU jumps.

 

after you go to the processes tab......should you find a program that is using a large amount CPU then simply click end task but make sure it's not system file that is vital to the opperation of the system.
If it's a proccess that won't crash the system if ended and you wish to keep it running (such as explorer.exe) then simply go to the application tab and click new task and type in the process that you want to resume running.
I've had a problem similar to this in the past with explorer......the system would slow down to a crawl or less after trying to run/running certain file types.......to fix it I would endtask explored and then newtask explorer.exe.

maybe your case is different but perhaps my case was similar to yours and will provide you with a solution to you problem.

I hope this helps in some sort of way.

 

When I go into the processes tab, which column is more important, CPU or memory usage

System Idle Process has 74-99 in the CPU column. explorer.exe and a couple of other things that have 0 to 3 in the CPU colum have 20,000K memory usage. Should I end the the System Idle Process, or is that important?

 

System Idle is just how much the processor is idling. If the CPU usage of System Idle is around 75% then total CPU usage will be around 25%, etc.

 

So system idle process isn't anything that I can/should end?

 

No...actually that is just the process that "uses" was isn't needed at the time. If that is the biggest user than something else is slowing down the system.

 

You can't (and shouldn't).

There has to be some process Windows can assign spare CPU time to. It can hardly tell the CPU to shut down for the next 200 ms, after all, and as long as the cpu is running, it expects to be told *what* to run. When no program needs the CPU, it has to do *something* while idling. That's what the System Idle process is for. It's basically just "run round and round in this loop until I give you something better to do".

And yeah, you can just ignore it. Look at the other processes that consume CPU time.

Since you asked about CPU usage, CPU is more important. If we were discussing processes with huge memory consumption, memory usage would be the column to look at.