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Where is my CPU running off to?

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zulfy26

Member
Joined
Jan 4, 2005
Location
Vancouver, WA
Over the past few weeks my overall performance has gotten slower and slower, to the point where it is so sluggish I can't even play World of Warcraft. I open up the task manager, and there aren't any tasks using CPU, but the CPU usage will ping between ~30-70%.

whereisit.bmp


In this screen shot you can see 36% of the CPU being used by various tasks but the overall usage is 70%. What other process is using CPU?
I am running Windows XP home with SP2 and rig in sig.
 
It appears that Interrupts -> Hardware Interrupts are using roughly 50% of my CPU.

Can someone explain what these are and why they are using so much CPU time?
 
I found what is causing the interupts -- my new 500gb SATA hard drive a Samsung HD501LJ -- is this problem hardware related (an RMA) or is there some type of driver I can update?
 
I assume you have the SATA HDD connected to the onboard nVidia SATA RAID controller running in IDE mode? If you're running w/ an older set of the NF4 chipset drivers, you may want to update them to the newest 6.86's...

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_nf4_win2k_6.86.html

... otherwise download and run the HDD diagnostics utility from Samsung:

http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/utilities/hutil.htm

You may instead have a bad SATA cable or SATA controller, but I'd run the diagnostics utility first.
 
redduc900 said:
I assume you have the SATA HDD connected to the onboard nVidia SATA RAID controller running in IDE mode? If you're running w/ an older set of the NF4 chipset drivers, you may want to update them to the newest 6.86's...

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_nf4_win2k_6.86.html

... otherwise download and run the HDD diagnostics utility from Samsung:

http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/utilities/hutil.htm

You may instead have a bad SATA cable or SATA controller, but I'd run the diagnostics utility first.

Oh is there a way to check which nForce drivers are installed?

And I'll mess with my SATA cables, etc and post an update.
 
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