Performance woes...

I'm new to the site; was referred by a gaming friend of mine. I'm excited to get a bit farther into it, looks great so far!

Question/issue: I'm getting bogged down by some factor that has eluded my capacities (which aren't much mind you). I've run spyware/AV removal tools with no success. The task manager spikes up to 100% cpu usage about every 15 seconds and lists "system idle process" as the usage hog. I'm running Windows 2000, with AVG and Zone Alarm running in the background. Thanks for any suggestions.

 

Hm. System Idle Process is supposed to be high. It's what your processor does when it not doing anything else. I'm assuming that you're actually experiencing the symptoms of a process using 100% CPU and it's just showing up under System Idle.

Try downloading Process Explorer, which is much more descriptive about things. Notably, it lists hardware interrupts and DPCs, which might not show up elsewhere.

What have you done to try to fix it yourself?

 

Other than running the spyware and AV removals, I haven't done much since I'm not sure where to aim at. It does help to know that System Idle should be high. I'm noticing the problem mostly while playing the mmorpg I'm currently devoted to. The slowdowns come in those same 15 second intervals I'm seeing on my task manager screen, and the game latency is not changing at the time of the slow spikes so I figured it wasn't a problem with the game, but with my computer somehow.

 

The problems seem to have subsided for now. I'll post again if and when it creeps back up, hopefully with some more specifics at the time. Thanks for the tip on Process Explorer.