System Idle Process?

I have a Dell Inspiron 2200 with XP Home.

Sometimes my disk drive seems active, more than it should be. When I go into
Task Manager/Processes it always says System Idle Process as taking about
95% of the CPU time.

What is this and how can I figure out what is going on?

MB

On May 31, 8:15 am, "MZB" <m...@noway.prudigy.net> wrote:
> I have a Dell Inspiron 2200 with XP Home.
>
> Sometimes my disk drive seems active, more than it should be. When I go into
> Task Manager/Processes it always says System Idle Process as taking about
> 95% of the CPU time.
>
> What is this and how can I figure out what is going on?
>
> MB

That's normal. System idle process is just what's not allocated to any
other process. Making the total of all processes 100%.

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

That's good!

System Idle Process is just what it says. It's a time filler that uses
up cycles when no other process needs them. Has to add up to 100%!

Your disk drive is, I'll bet, indexing. Right click on the C: drive in
My Computer and choose properties. Uncheck the box that says something
like Index this drive. It will give you a popup and choose all
sub-directories. You'll get some errors. Click ignore.

Tom

> -----Original Message-----
> From: MZB [mailto:moo@noway.prudigy.net]
> Posted At: Thursday, May 31, 2007 11:15 AM
> Posted To: alt.sys.pc-clone.dell
> Conversation: System Idle Process?
> Subject: System Idle Process?
>
> I have a Dell Inspiron 2200 with XP Home.
>
> Sometimes my disk drive seems active, more than it should be. When I
go
> into
> Task Manager/Processes it always says System Idle Process as taking
> about
> 95% of the CPU time.
>
> What is this and how can I figure out what is going on?
>
> MB

Tom Scales wrote:
> System Idle Process is just what it says. It's a time filler that uses
> up cycles when no other process needs them. Has to add up to 100%!

I don't know the CPU here, but for instance the PDP-11 had a wait instruction
which stops the CPU but leaves it ready to receive an interrupt and resume.

(If you placed your wait instruction at a nice address with all zeros except
one 1, then the panel lights went dark when the machine went idle, which was
fairly neat if you wanted to figure out what it was doing.)

In the wait case there are no cycles to eat up.

It would be useful to propagate to chips because it reduces the energy and hence
the heat, so they may have done so.

--
Ron Hardin
rhhardin@mindspring.com

On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.