Where do all the cycles go ?

I have XP Home, all the current patches. After the system has been up for abt
20 minutes, something kicks off that sucks up all the cycles for about 3
minutes, bringing the machine to a crawl. Task Manager shows Idle at abt 90%,
with a couple of other tasks flashing in & out. After about 3 minutes, the
machine returns to normal. How do I nail which task or process is chewing up
all the cycles ?

"tecktalk" wrote in message
...

I have XP Home, all the current patches. After the system has been up
for abt
20 minutes, something kicks off that sucks up all the cycles for about
3
minutes, bringing the machine to a crawl. Task Manager shows Idle at
abt 90%,
with a couple of other tasks flashing in & out. After about 3 minutes,
the
machine returns to normal. How do I nail which task or process is
chewing up
all the cycles ?




--
tecktalk

Same thing is with one of the PC's I am working with. In our case it is
antivirus, which is not shown in the task manager list. I bet you have same
problem.
Alex.

While it is misbehaving, press CNTRL-Alt-Del. that will bring up the
Windows Task Manager. Select the PROCESSES tab, and scroll down the CPU
column looking for a Process that is using a large percentage of CPU cycles.

--
--DaveW


"tecktalk" wrote in message
...

I have XP Home, all the current patches. After the system has been up
for abt
20 minutes, something kicks off that sucks up all the cycles for about
3
minutes, bringing the machine to a crawl. Task Manager shows Idle at
abt 90%,
with a couple of other tasks flashing in & out. After about 3 minutes,
the
machine returns to normal. How do I nail which task or process is
chewing up
all the cycles ?




--
tecktalk

DaveW wrote:
While it is misbehaving, press CNTRL-Alt-Del. that will bring up the
Windows Task Manager. Select the PROCESSES tab, and scroll down the CPU
column looking for a Process that is using a large percentage of CPU cycles.


I think the OP mentioned that he's using Task Manager and he sees
nothing is wrong.

Yousuf Khan

tecktalk wrote:
I have XP Home, all the current patches. After the system has been up
for abt
20 minutes, something kicks off that sucks up all the cycles for about
3
minutes, bringing the machine to a crawl. Task Manager shows Idle at
abt 90%,
with a couple of other tasks flashing in & out. After about 3 minutes,
the
machine returns to normal. How do I nail which task or process is
chewing up
all the cycles ?

Is there a lot of hard disk activity when this is happening (LED stays
lit solid)? Maybe you're swapping a lot, but there might be a bad sector
on the hard disk that delays the swap update?

Yousuf Khan