Gordon Totty wrote;
>about 12 items in the system tray and about 70 processes running.

The twelve items in the tray will account for some overhead on your system
and the fact you have seventy processes running will show the CPU and memory
refreshing this state regularly. You will experience the CPU and Memory
usage going up and down.

>Normal state is for about 5% CPU utilization with nothing going on,

This is where you will have to do some investigative work. My CPU usage runs
between 2-8% when it is supposedly idle. One would think that if there was
no usage, i.e. internet, games and such the CPU would or should show zero.
Well, again I have 46 processes running in the background. As for my tray, I
have a minimal amount.

I see where my CPU usage is between 2-8% and the system idle % is about
95-98%. If I compare these two values, I see they go up and down in hand. I
have an Intel P4 Extreme with three levels of cache. All of these levels
contribute to the overall usage of the CPU time. It is a refresh process
that continues to update the information in memory.

If you allow Windows to manage your virtual memory you will experience
another bout of CPU usage as it expands and shrinks according to what the
operating systems deems necessary. I have over a gig of memory and I turned
off my VM because I didn't need it clogging up the drain.

Looking at other items in the process I see that Task Manager consumes +- 2%
of the CPU and laying stake to about 2392K of memory. Then I have
A-Watch.exe again +-2% but consuming 8944K of memory. Explorer takes a big
bite out of the process in as much as it consumes 22,480K but only uses +-2%
of the CPU time for refresh. The list goes on and I hope this may help
clarify what may be happening in the background of you system.

>Once in about three fresh boots something grabs and holds about 25% of the
>CPU.

I think I would set your memory to a fixed value for both the minimum and
maximum to see if this helps. It is a try.

You made mention of "Norton System Doctor". This is part of Norton System
works and if you have the 2005 version, it is a known fact that this version
will hog a bunch of real estate on your system.

>I always find that System Idle Process is showing 90 to 94%.  In other
>words, the resource hog that has a grip on 25% is hidden from Task Manager.
>closing items one-by-one does not reveal the identity of the pirate.

I'm trying to do the math here and if the system is showing the CPU being
90-94% idle, then I think the active process should be, 6-10% usage. I could
be wrong here because I was never good with math. The relationship between
the CPU usage and system idle time is in relationship to each other.

>but would like to find and eliminate the culprit.  What else should I try?

I would observe all of the processes in Task Manager to see what is going on
and off. As I stated earlier, Explorer was using +-2% of the CPU time for
refresh. Look to see what each process is doing and how much activity it's
creating. Try setting your Virtual Memory to a fixed value for minimum and
maximum.

Look at the system configuration utility (MSCONFIG) for what is loaded
during boot up. Do you have AOL, Real Networks software or anything else?
These may be the problematic features that are using resources. On the
remote side, do you think you might have any phone home or spy ware features
running.

There are times that trying to solve issues like this is difficult. It could
be something obvious and over looked or something so obscure you can't see
it.

Sincerely,

Frank Suszka
netTek Computers
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