Dell Power Management application spiking CPU every 10 seconds

I would like to contribute to this community by providing a solution to a problem I had that took quite a while to solve.

When looking at task manager on my Dell E6440 running Windows 7, I noticed that when the machine is completely idle (or should be completely idle - several minutes after a clean boot and no programs launched), the CPU spikes up to between 10-20% just for 1 second, every 10 seconds!

Even in safe mode this was happening. I could make it stop by disabling the Power service, or disabling the Windows Management Instrumentation service. But - that's just for troubleshooting, as those should both be running.

Finally, I stumbled upon a post about someone uninstalling a bunch of the apps in the Dell bundle that came with Windows 7.  So I uninstalled Dell Power Manager, Dell Backup and Restore, and "dell protected workspace".

I rebooted the machine, and now everything is peaceful!

Those Dell apps were not really causing much performance degradation, but when my machine is idle, I want it to be idle! Besides, what do I need all that stuff for? Windows already has power management. Uninstalling the Dell Power Manager does not hurt the built-in windows stuff for managing power.