Why is my CPU usage % high? ~Pentium 4 Need help

Question

Hello Everybody,

I have Latitude C840, great notebook seems to be very reliable. One thing that bugs me all the time is that if I look Task Manager my CPU usagage shown in % is pretty high alot of times. When playing mp3's on my Media player or watching picture shound presentation yesterday it was probably running around 100% and fan was full speed. Usually I can tell by my fan running most of the time. I don't know what would this problem indicate a bad CPU or sound card, video/graphics card. I not good with computer hardware. If anybody have any clue please share with me so I can do something. It's very annoying and I know that this state is not normal since my computer have somewhat fast CPU and other things.

These are my specs:

Latitude C840
2.2 Ghz Pentium 4
512 MB RAM
64 MB Nvidia GeForce
100GB hard drive
Windows XP Pro SP 1
some basic sound card
up to date virus and firewall, anti-spyware
Just standard laptop for that model.

Just a standard home setup nothing fancy no networking or anything else.

I would appreciate any feedback in this matter. Thank you

Message Edited by IGOR1981 on 03-03-2006 07:58 AM

IGOR1981 · Answer

I'll have to check this out when I come home. I'll be just running Windows Media player and it would be using like 50%+ CPU usage! I think that's just unacceptable with those specs. When my office pc is 1.75Ghz and it barely uses any CPU when playing music browsing internet and have 5 other programs open. This doesn't make any sense to me.

Is my CPU bad? or 64MB Nvidia not adequate?

Any comments on this situation. Thank you for your feedback.

austinbrtndr · Answer

First; you need to find out what programs are running... best way to do this is with the Hijack This! program. You can get it for free at download.com , then just post the results either here or you can do a quick search and find several HJT specific forums that can help you out...

Dan Walmsley · Answer

I had a similar problem with my CPx, the CPU usage was high constantly, for no real reason, the fan was contantly atg high speed which was annoying, and the system seemed dangerously hot, it scalded if you touched the underneath, i used software which read the CPUs temp at nearly 100 deg Celcius.   After installing Windows defender beta 2 , and running a scan it found a few viruses on my PC and lots of spyware, when it remove a series of Worm viruses and rebooted my machine now ran faster, i no longer had a problem with the CPU load and the CPU temp was now at only 38 - 45deg Celcius, a little higher when using video etc, but the fan is now hardly ever on, and it never gets as dangerously hot as before.   To install Windows defender you need a genuine version of Windows XP, and you can get it from http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx     Hope this helps

IGOR1981 · Answer

I had something from Microsoft that scans spyware and then I have Spybot, Adaware and System Mechanic that I have been using and Antivirus up to date most of the time. It's usually not bad on idle if nothing is running it's fine.

Once I start playing music it usually jumps to anywhere from 40-50% CPU usage and if I try to do something more intense even some kind of scan my performance degrades by much and sometimes it just seems like my laptop can't handle certain multimedia simple tasks effortlessly. I don't know, but I'm a bit confused since I don't know much about hardware. Is there anything else that could hinder my performance?

mrrobind · Answer

After 6 days of intensive research and try this-try that..... I was able to reduce the high CPU usage from 100% to 2%. Keep in mind the high cpu on a DELL 4550, P4 2.0 GHZ with 384 mg ram was pulling the 100% usage with no programs running.

The probabliity of this being virus, spy ware etc. related would appear to be high.

The FIX:

F2 SYSTEM SETUP

CPU INFORMATION

IF CPU SPEED IS SET TO COMPATIBLE... CHANGE TO NORMAL

:smileywink:

IGOR1981 · Answer

Thank you for your help. I will try it tonight and see what happens.

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Why is my CPU usage % high? ~Pentium 4 Need help

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