New member Vista issue

[RoadStar]

I`ve been a longtime lurker here and started a membership a few weeks ago so this is my first official post.

Here`s the situation. I recently put together a new build. Intel Dual Core E7200...Gigabyte-EP35-DS3L mobo....2G Crucial PC 8700 ram.....Vista Ultimate SP1 32 bit. Everything went very smoothly and Vista install was for the most part eventless and went well also. I ran all the updates. Over the next several days I was migrating data files to my new system, installed a few programs, Firefox, Open Office, Trend Micro and everything still seemed to run nicely but I did notice in taskmanager that the CPU showed high usage when it should have been idling, between 60-80%. I researched this issue for a few days, finding this was a common problem to many users, and found nothing out of the ordinary. I did finally disable sidebar, restarted and the CPU usage completely settled down. The CPU showed idle at 0-4% with Super Prefetch and indexing enabled. I continued setting my system up and about 2 days after that I set upp another account and noticed my CPU idle went back to 60-80% again. I disabled sidebar on that account but it made no difference.

To try to resolve this, I did a complete PC restore from a Windows disc image to the previous state when the idle was normal. needless to say, the CPU idle situation is still present. As far as I can asertain, this sytem is completely clean and I have very start up items. AV, Spybot, HJT all show for the most part a very clean system. The native Vista monitoring tools show everything normal however the health monitoring scan at PCPitstop shows an entirely different result. With the system in the state it is now, my CPU and memory respectively post scores of 9188\3328, when the system was scanned in it`s low idle state of 0-4% it posted scores of 20048\12425 respectively placing the CPU\memory in the top 10\4% repsectively. This situation definately affects system performance.

At this point I am at wits end as to the cause. Almost all of the activity comes from system in task manager, bouncing constanly between 10-20% Although System idle reads between 65-80% the CPU graph shows an average of 60% usage. I`ll try to post screens shots and hope someone can shed some light on this issue.

Thank you.

[shadowpr]

Those pictures don't tell me much.

What process is using up the cpu? system idle is suposed to be high as i is in that picture you posted.

I would also look at the usualy suspects: Anti-virus running in the background, and indexing on a new vista computer. Also, like you said, prefetch will take some, but that should only last a few days.

[RoadStar]

Thanks for the reply shadowpr. Actually they don`t tell me much either...:)

Upon start up or reboot, there is a flurry of activity, to be expected for about a minute. TCS.exe (Trend Micro related) shows high CPU usage for about 30 seconds then stops. A few other processes do the same and always after about a minute, the only thing showing any activity is SYSTEM with CPU usage bouncing constantly (about 2x\sec) between 10-20% maintaing an average CPU usage of about 60%. I have "show processes from all users" checked and at this moment everything shows 0% usage except System Idle showing 70-80% idle time....SYSTEM constantly bouncing from 10-20% activity.....Task Manager 1-2%. Everything else is 00.

The thing is, I just don`t know what SYSTEM is doing all the time causing the sharp spikes and dips in the CPU graph. Indexing shows it is completed. (saw that somewhere in one of the tools) I even disabled Super Prefetch and indexing at one point and that did mothing so I re enabled it. Very perplexing. I`m just hoping maybe Vista takes a few days to configure itself or something then will settle down.

Everything actually runs very quick and have yet to have any hangs or freeze ups no matter what I am running but I do suspect if I were to truly load the system It may slow things down.

The machine I am upgrading from is a XP 2100+, 1 G of PC2100 RAM running W2k. A typical session would have Firefox, Mozilla, with oddles of tabs open, Second Life which consumes loads of RAM, Vid and CPU time and playing music on Real Player all the while and never had any probs at all except a VERY occasional crash in Second Life (buggy code) which anyone playing that game experiences. I`m not so sure this sytem could maintain that sort of load for any length of time with out some issues.

[RoadStar]

Finally got it!!!!!

I ran Process Explorer and found out I was getting a constant 30-40% CPU hit on DPCs which is usually driver related. Since this is for the most part a bare bones virgin system THE only thing I could think of was the vid card so I uninstalled and re-installed the driver and VOILA!!. CPU idle at 0%.

Compare the original screen shots I sent to these beauties...:)