CPU Spikes - Abnormal?

[katzdvd]

I have noticed this issue for maybe a month or so...At random times when I am using the pc, I can hear the CPU fan slightly slow down & then resume normal speed again. On a rare occassion, the mouse will actually freeze for a second or two, & then when the fan speeds up again, the mouse becomes "unstuck"!

I checked the performance graph, see a lot of spikes but I don't really know what would be considered excessive.



Funny thing is, a lot of the times this occurs is when I am not really using the pc for labor intensive purposes. Did a google search on this & came up with everything from virus/spyware/software conflicts/bad hardware, etc.

I was thinking maybe power supply could be going? Any ideas?

regards, katz

[Chewy]

katz,
with 508 threads and 41 processes running, who in the heck knows?

my best guess is "too much crap"

[anonymez]

quite a few processes running there katz; could be anything

[katzdvd]

with 508 threads

? What are threads?

I guess I need to close some stuff down, huh? I wonder what the "typical" user has running on their pc? I never really paid that much attention to that - you know how it is; as long as all is working well, you keep the hood down & don't go poking around for trouble

[Chewy]

a power user setup

but nothing fancy or hard

[katzdvd]

That looks real good chewy, at least compared to mine! I can see that I am going to have to do some research on this so I can get mine "humming" along! I wonder how much of a performance boost I will experience real-time if I slim it down like that?

[NightTran]

I have more thread and process then you but still I dont have those sharp spikes

[soup]

Remember I am Folding@Home.

[Chewy]

a couple years back, my bro-in-law showed me his new computer with everything loading at startup, his was a little faster than mine, I asked him to open word or excel, it took about 10 seconds, mine a few seconds, this one about a second.

after you have experienced lean and mean and the snappy response, you'll never go back.

course I am not very patient

[uufta]

Mine is about the same as yours Katz, except for all the spikes.
(Those two spikes happened with two email notifications)
15 processes are associated with Nortons and Spysweeper. OUCH!

[katzdvd]

chewy,
So, if I follow your power user setup, I can lean it out like that?
And, you are only running 1/2 GB of RAM?

[Chewy]

1/2 a gig of very fast ram(43 nanosecond latency in everest)

no disk thrashing from page file use so far

1st pic vision changing a ntsc vob to a pal vob
2nd pic shrink doing a 55% transcode

200-250 megs still available

[katzdvd]

chewy,
I followed the power user thread to a "T", & did all you suggested. (Great thread!) I had briefly looked it over in the past, should've done it sooner!

My pc is definantly noticably faster now. However, the threads are still a bit high at 431, processes at 38. What more can I do to slim this beast down?

How about a power user setup: part II thread ?!?

[Chewy]

even msconfig won't stop everything once you've gotten the ball rolling on it's way to windows lethargy,

go into each program that loading something at startup and turn it off

do the add/remove windows components

then last pick up the strays with msconfig

I can run lean and mean without alot of tweaking cause I don't install many programs, my days of testing experimenting are long gone.

How about a power user setup: part II thread ?!?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm?

Most can't even make it thru part 1

[soup]

I hate to bring another program in to the mix & I don't know if you already know about it katzdvd. You could take a look at AutoRuns (it's free) for startup etc. Friends put me on to it.