What the heck is going on here? Do I need to upgrade to a faster CPU? (picture included)

This is a capture of my performance monitor with my AVG doing a scan, Windows Defender doing a scan, and defragmenting going on, along with my favorite used programs. Is this normal? I thought my computer could handle multitasking like this? Please post any comments or feedback. Thanks.

 

virus scanning and defragmenting is a lot of stress on your hard disk. you should probably do one at a time.

 

Well... a faster CPU never hurt nobody..

 

I'm not worried about the stress on the hard drive. I buy a new notebook almost every year or so. But, should I have gotten a faster CPU? I thought these new ones could handle ALOT

 

At 97 processes, I think it's doing a fine job.

 

Is your computer running sluggish? When you're thrashing your hard disk like that, multitasking won't be very smooth.

 

Might be worth checking, is your HDD running in PIO or DMA mode? I know XP will disable DMA mode if there are frequent disk/controller errors. AVG / defragging shouldn't eat that much CPU... at least, in XP it doesn't for me.

 

With all that virus scanning, defragmenting, I think your computer is handling all that just fine.

 

I don't think a faster CPU (by todays standards) would help much. I agree with what others have already said. I think that doing a virus scan, defender scan, defragmentation, and "along with your other fav. apps" is asking A LOT. These are all very hard drive intensive. I wouldn't be concerned about wearing out the hard drive. However, the hard drive is your "bottle neck". If your hard drive is thrashing away, the difference between a T7300 and a T7800 will most likely be negligible. You would probably see more of a performance gain with a 7200 .2 HDD or even better yet a SSD.

However, for the tasks you are trying to perform you are doing pretty good. I would think that with laptop technology about 3 or 4 years ago your laptop would have probably come to a screeching halt.

 

The HD is usually the biggest bottleneck. The Hitachi 7k200 or Seagate Momentus 7200.2 drive would alleviate some of that definitely.

Since a cpu or graphics upgrade will include new planars, the easiest upgrades are mem and HD without buying a new laptop every 6 months. Max those out first before considering a major upgrade.

 

Your CPU can multitask, but not your hard disk.

 

in the graph, the cpu didn't hit 100% all that much. It appears as though your cpu is handling those tasks as fast as the hard drive can do its work.

 

I dont know of a computer that wont max cpu if doing a defrag and virus scan simotaneously...

 

quad core maybe. Defragging is best done without other HD intensive apps running...depends on what level of defragging and size of HD too. For throrough defrag I just leave it alone while I sleep.

 

Thanks for your responses. I do have a 5400rpm HD..and that is why I was confused. It showed the CPU being used a lot, almost to its max limit. However, the HD was running normally.

I was confused b/c it seemed as if my CPU was bottlenecking first before the HD

 

As someone else has mentioned already, the virus scanner and the defragger is looking up information at different parts of the drive. You're basically telling the drive to seek back and forth... this will decrease speed drastically. Those programs need to be ran in order, and not in parallel. Running the defragger while other programs (such as a virus scanner) have files locked is also counter-productive... the defragger won't be able to move those data blocks to their proper locations.

 

It is silly to defrag and Virus scan at the same time because it just creates thrashing.

Your performance monitor is quite "normal" for the compute demands placed on it and if you really looked at the performance monitor you would notice that you rarely saturated the cpu

AND

If you had, the scheduler would have accomodated new demands, sharing the compute resources across compute demands.

 

I didn't think of using the defrag, av, and defender at diff times as they conflict. Thanks for the tip

 

two scans and defrag ... come on man, your HDD is probably doing work all the time

 

Eyecon

I sorry I said you were silly and I apologize. I didn't notice who the OP was. The good news is that you don't need a new CPU. Certain phases of defragmentation are quite consumptive.

 

It's quite ok. I do understand what I was doing wrong now. However, I still thought the new CPU's could handle more than that? Plus, the HD was going pretty wild too

 

Of course the harddrive was working hard. Defragmentation is about moving files and pieces of files, the disk is being driven as hard as it can be. Virus scanning is very similar as far as the disk is concerned so your were giving the disk two very arduauous task and they were competing for head movement time.

As far as your cpu was concerned, it wasn't saturating that much at all. Whatever cpu you are running, it is far from maxed out. Even if it were, timesharing will share cpu demands out horizontally in time. Your machine would always finish a job but it might take longer.

Your machine is fine.

 

Your problem is that virus scanning and defraging is not supposed to be done at the same time. Avg is opening the files and scanning them while they are being moved around and a files that avg scanned is later moved by defragmenter. The same happens if you try to run two virus scans or use two antivirus prgrams that have auto protect enabled. They simply hog all resources.

 

Wait, why doesn't your task manager show two CPU graphs? Is the CPU not C2D?

 

Go into task manager. Click View-->CPU History--> and it will give you the option of showing it has 1 cpu or 2. showing 1 just averages out the 2 I guess

 

92% is just the percent of load at that sampled time. your average CPU load is lower than that.

 

Eyecon,

It seems that your fear it that you are going to run out of cpu. You won't. Windows is a time sharing system. It will schedule compute requests and speard them out in time. You are doing two highly demanding tasks at the same and your system is still not saturating.

 

I had to chuckle when I saw you running Defrag at the same time as AVG and defender.

Good times.