W2k "leaks" CPU power

[niktheblak]

Greets,

As the title says, I'm losing both my hair and my sleep over a mysterious "clock cycle leakage" issue in Windows 2000.

The leakage is apparent at Task Manager's CPU usage view. When the system is supposed to be completely idle (System Idle Process reports 99% of the CPU time), the Task Manager still indicates a CPU usage of ~10 %. This is even more disturbing, because the process list view indeed show 99 at % Idle process, but the CPU usage at the bottom of the panel shows 10 % usage simultaneously.

That 10 % "power loss" is visible with any CPU intesive task, such as MP3, MusePack and XviD encoding as well as Seti@Home time/PU ratio. I can make a comparison since the system didn't always behave like this, when it was idle the CPU usage also showed 0 %.

This "leakage" started very suddenly and I can't get rid of it. And no, I don't have spyware processes consuming bandwidth. I tried killing just about every process in the list, but it didn't help. I also scanned my system for viruses & spyware and couldn't find any.

Could this be because my USB is enabled? I remember that back with my old Celeron system and Windows XP I had the exactly same symptoms, the CPU usage also hovered around 20 %. But disabling USB altogether "solved" the problem and the CPU usage showed 0 % when system was idle. I kind of doubt the USB issue, since I have always kept it enabled and noticed no power leakage.

I can't pinpoint the startup point to be after any particular software install. Althought, the leakage mysteriously started after I used an USB Compact Flash reader for a brief period of time. It required a driver installation.

I'm sorry if this is a futile topic to post about, but please, I'm really losing my mind with this one. I want my CPU power back (so that Seti@Home can use it ), and I would really appreciate any kind of help!

The system specs are (relevant items):

Windows 2000 Service Pack 3
EPoX 4G4A+ with 1.8A Pentium 4 (Intel USB 2.0 controller) with the latest BIOS
Downloaded USB2 drivers through Windows Update
256 MB DDR266
USB mouse

 

[Electrode]

Perhaps there is a bug in task manager, or the functions it uses to get process info. Sometimes top on Linux gives pretty screwy info (such as negative and >100% CPU usage, and tiny apps like my clock dockapp taking something like 80% CPU time) so I wouldn't worry about it.

 

[spyordie007]

I agree, this:

That 10 % "power loss" is visible with any CPU intesive task, such as MP3, MusePack and XviD encoding as well as Seti@Home time/PU ratio. I can make a comparison since the system didn't always behave like this, when it was idle the CPU usage also showed 0 %

would bother the hell out of me, I dont know what it is but I would start by killing all your startup processes. Either get MSCONFIG or do it in the registry:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
And also in the startup program group. If that doesnt do it I would begin systematically stopping services to see if you can find the culprit.

Good Luck

-Spy

 

[niktheblak]

Thanks for the replies guys!

@Electrode

No, I don't think it's a task manager bug. As I said, the power loss is visible on i.e. encoding speed. For example; when I had no "power leakage", Musepack encoded about at 12.35x and now it encodes 11.00x That's roughly about 10 % speed loss. Same behaviour with LAME and XviD.

@spyordie007

Yes, it's indeed driving me mad. I already tried tidying up my startup list and registry with Regcleaner but alas, without success. I also tried killing quite a bunch of processes, also without success.

But I guess I will need extreme solutions, so perhaps I think I'm going to temporarely clear the whole startup list and start killing processes until the system crashes. I just have to find out what causes this!

Maybe I should also start deleting some "useless" DLL files (for example from the USB CF reader device drivers, RealPlayer and such). That gives me a great opportunity to reinstall W2k anyway when the system dies completely

Also, I think I should test with USB disabled from the BIOS. I heard from somewhere that just plain enabling USB causes considerable slowdowns. Too bad I have an USB mouse...

 

[niktheblak]

OK, it seems that I've solved the problem at least for the time being.

I tried stopping every service the Service Manager would let me and after that killing every process the Task Manager allowed to kill, but without success.

Eventually I uninstalled the drivers for the CF reader I mentioned. I dug out that the reader had installed two files, USBAUTH.SYS and USBSTOR.SYS. I had to boot from the W2k CD and go to the recovery console to delete those files. Windows wouldn't let me delete them even in safe mode.

After that, when the system finished booting, the CPU power leak was still there. But after about 10 minutes, it disappeared! Now Task Manager shows correctly 0 % CPU usage when the system is idle, and CPU-intensive tasks work as fast as they used to be.

I don't know am I relieved or not, I fixed the problem but I'm not certain that it was removing the CF Reader drivers that actually did the trick. Could be sunspots for all that I know

 

[spyordie007]

I'll have to tell you Niko, you took that much further than I would have... glad to hear you got it working.

-Spy

 

[Strawa]

Originally posted by: spyordie007
I'll have to tell you Niko, you took that much further than I would have... glad to hear you got it working.

-Spy