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    Why is my CPU having spikes? (picture included)

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by Recipe7, Jul 25, 2008.

  1. Recipe7

    Recipe7 Notebook Guru

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    [​IMG]

    This picture was taken when there was nothing running on my laptop. What is the reason for this?

    I'm running a 32bit Vista Premium.
     
  2. surfasb

    surfasb Titles Shmm-itles

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    What program is that??

    Vista runs a lot of stuff in the background. It is just making use of idle CPU time.
     
  3. Thomas

    Thomas McLovin

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    Dude..chill..it's 8%......
    It's put to good use too..
     
  4. knightingmagic

    knightingmagic Notebook Deity

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    The CPU monitor itself uses some CPU power.
     
  5. Recipe7

    Recipe7 Notebook Guru

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    Thanks for your responses people.

    I'm glad it's nothing to worry about. I guess it makes me feel that my computer is having "Seismic Activity", hehe.
     
  6. Nocturnal310

    Nocturnal310 Notebook Virtuoso

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    Actually i get CPU spikes ...usage jumps to 100% on System resume.
     
  7. Jamaicanyouth

    Jamaicanyouth Notebook Evangelist

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    That CPU monitor that you use on the Vista SideBar takes CPU also.
     
  8. swarmer

    swarmer beep beep

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    8% isn't much of a spike... but in general, to find out what's eating your cpu... open Task Manager, click Processes tab, Click Show processes from all users, Approve UAC prompt, click the "CPU" column header to sort by CPU... and you may have to click it again to reverse the sort order. You should see the processes using the most cpu at the top of the list.
     
  9. Recipe7

    Recipe7 Notebook Guru

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    Thanks for that swarmer, that's very useful.
     
  10. Shyster1

    Shyster1 Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    Could be just about anything that runs in the background, such as internal _Vista system processes, anti-virus/spyware, disk I/O, wireless/bluetooth polling, what have you. As everyone else has said, though, from what you've shown, it looks perfectly normal.