System Idle Process

Hi all. 

I have been working with Ken (link below) and we have gone through a series of clean ups. All seems to be normal but sys Idle Process runs at 95-98 cpu normally. Is this normal. Ken stated his runs high CPU also so I am guessing it is normal.

However, many times the yellow flashing light is on and I can hear the clickity click sound coming from the computer as if it is doing something and I check and it is not, yet it runs slow as if it is. Weird. 

Thought I would see what you thought about this issue.

Thanks

http://forums.whatthetech.com/index.php?showtopic=129668&page=1

I don't know if this is helpful for you… but basically the less "work" your computer is doing, the more "power" available to System Idle processes as these only run in down time.  Here is a fairly decent wiki about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Idle_Process

If you're getting a clickty click sound from your computer, I would suggest backing up your data immediately then replacing the hard drive.

If the drive is failing this can cause system slow down.

@ TomK– Yes, Ken helped point that out to me too right after I posted. Thanks. However I feel as if there are things running in the background that don't need to be and that startup processes run forever on startup. This could just be normal and I have to keep in mind that this computer is 10-12 year old. I am working to get stuff off the computer so it will have more memory and such. Once I am done I can defray and all that happy stuff. The joys of windows.

@Ztruker No, I believe you are mistaken, but it is no wonder as it is hard for me to describe the 'sound' it is making. The sound is the same sound it has always made when programs are running. It isn't like the drive and reader are failing. 

I think the point is that you need to look at what is running when it should be idle.  My idle processes show 99% when I am in fact idling.  You say that you often run at 95%.  What process is running and using the 5%?

I will investigate that. Thank you. I know it goes from one thing to another and many times very quickly. I guess it doesn't sound abnormal to anyone. 

Probably not abnormal… but perhaps there is something running slowing you down.

I finally gave up on my old XP partly because of some of the issue you are having.  Seems like it was always trying to run something in the background and it would take, literally, 30+ minutes to start up.  It was constantly trying to update something - which pretty much stopped it as I only had 512Mb of memory to work with.

It works pretty good off of a Puppy Linux live CD.