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Vic 970
01-07-2004, 03:36 PM
what is your cpu doing?

whilst running tests on my other pc which is down at the moment I decided to run system monitor on my compaq to see if I could establish which background progs were causing high cpu usage, which occurrs on both machines.

the only things running on this were basically anti virus plus a couple of others, all of which I could identify.

cpu usage was at 36% and resembled a set of stairs (lying down horizontally) whith a difference of 5% between the upper and lower. every few minutes (maybe 10 or 20) it would suddenly level out for a couple of minutes or so then it would leap to 100% and stay there for about a minute. after which it would produce a series of long 'teeth' from about 5% to 100% then revert back to the 'stairs' at 36%

I ended all other running progs until I was left with explorer, system tray and system monitor only, it went up 1% to 37% but acted generally similar to before.

this I have studied before, and on the other pc will sit around 80% at times.

could be that system monitor doesn't work well with 98se and cannot be relied upon, but I have no other comparisons,

also, an idea of temp of AMD duron spitfire 750 would be helpful. I remember it as being around 44 in the past but over the last couple of days have seen it as high as 52 and as low as 26, but found no suggested limits.

mjc
01-07-2004, 05:54 PM
could be that system monitor doesn't work well with 98se and cannot be relied upon, but I have no other comparisons,


YES!!!!!!!!!!!

The Win98 (not just se) sysmon is junk!!!! There is a bug in it that almost always misreports CPU usage.

Grab Process Explorer from www.sysinternals.com and run it...the middle column (default setup) shows CPU usage, you will notice that most of the time that the Idle (which isn't really a process.....but is exactly what it says it is) is sitting somewhere over 90%.