XP: mind of its own?

anybody familiar with the Windows Taskmanager? I have two PCs side by side running XP and the TM in one just shows the processor at 0 to 4 percent at idle but the other one goes from 10 to a 100 percent constantly as if it was doing something real important!

what gives?

is there a list of processes i can look up to see what it should or should not be doing?

Watch the process list, in Task Manager, in the Processes tab, sort it by CPU usage, and see what process is using the processor. When you find out what it is, post back. It could be something like hidden spyware or something.

Thanks for posting. at idle with no apps running (that I know of) here goes: (please allow for translation)

System inactive process (20 kb)
taskmgr.exe (4,460 kb)
System (20 kb)
explorer.exe (12,452)
svhost.exe ( 1,944 kb) net service
svhost.exe (1,632 kb) local service
svhost.exe (716 kb) net

What's the CPU usage on those processes?
System Idle Process should have a very high reading when idle, and Task manager will jump around a couple %, but thre rest should be almost idle.

System idle --> 79
explorer --> 01
tskmgr --> 01
system --> 01
svhost --> 01

looks good from here, maybe Im just a bit paranoid?

NOTE> machine A is 300 mhz and machine B is 2530 mhz. Could this have something to do?

yeah, tha'd do it. I thought you were talking about identical computers. It's normal then. Being a faster computer, the 2530mhz one will use a fraction of it's processing power compared with the 300mhz one which will use alot of it's processing power doing the same thing.

My 1.33Gig idles at 0-1% cpu usage with 29 processes, and my 300mhz gateway is running about 30% with 37 processes, it idles about 5-10%, but i'm doing stuff on it. Both on 2k

cool - Thanks for the info!