My System Idle Process is using up 95 CPU

[Quixote1818]

Is there some kind of spy ware causing this? The little light on the front of my computer starts flickering and my computer's speed shuts down to not much more than a crawl. When I check windows task mgr, it shows my System Idle Process is using 80 to 95 CPU and nothing else is above 5 CPU. However, my CPU Usage is running between 2% and 50%. I bought RegCur to solve the problem but it didn't seem to help. I also bought spy sweeper and still no change.

Sometimes the computer runs smooth as a butter knife though butter and other times I feel like pulling my hair out. It just seems like it's getting bogged down more and more lately.

Any suggestions? Should I take my computer in for a tune up?

[hobbit709]

1. The light means the hard drive is being accessed.

Is the antivirus running a scan? What times is it doing this-is it always at the same time of day or does it bounce around.

[Quixote1818]

2. It bounces around and has become very frequent.

In fact it is doing it right now. Just caused a few words I typed to delay in showing up. It has gotten to where it does it almost all the time. I would say that in an hours time it will disrupt me about 20 times or more.

[Babel_17]

3. Do you have Indexing enabled for your hard drives?

Do you have any .avi files on your drives? Broken .avi files are notorious for causing explorer.exe to go nutso on some configurations, maybe you have a similar problem.

I'm no expert and without being in front of your PC I'm hesitant to suggest things to look at.

http://www.liutilities.com/products/wintaskspro/processlibrary/system/

[RC]

4. Bring up 'Task Manager' and click on the 'Processes' tab

Click on the 'CPU' header once or twice so you can see what is using all the cpu cycles. If you don't recognize the image name, Google it.

[DerekJ]

5. DO you see:

Image Name: System Idle Process
User Name: System
CPU: 95

In this case it's functioning correctly, that doesn't mean that your idle processes are using 95% of the system, that means there are 95% of the system idle.

[paparush]

6. Umm..this is a good thing. It means that there are not tons of hidden

process stealing cpu cycles.

If you have no programs open, and your CPU usage is 20, 30, 50%, THEN you need to start looking around (spyware, malware) at what is running in the background.