Why are SYSTEM and taskmgr.exe taking up 100% of my CPU? *

Question

I'm running 32-bit Windows 2003 R2 in VMware 6.0.3 on my Windows XP 32-bit host OS. I have run all the Windows updates, but haven't done any other tweaking. About once every hour (but not quite on a schedule) my CPU usage goes to 100%, slowing everything down for about 1 minute. When I can get taskmgr up, I see that usually a process called "SYSTEM" is using most of the CPU. Occasionally taskmgr itself is using up almost all of it. What is causing this, and how can I avoid it?

The host machine is an older Pentium D with 3 gigs RAM. The VM is running from a relatively fast SATA drive. Memory usage in either the host or the guest doesn't seem to be a factor in whether or not these slowdowns will occur.

Answer

I happened to stumble across the same problem you are describing, one of the processes of vista itself that uses all, or most, of the CPU resources for a few seconds to return to normal afterward, and back again. It wasn't my own computer so at first I hadn't a clue of what was installed recently, if the problem did occur before but was never noticed etc, so I had to go look and see if others might have the same problem

As it turned out it was a misbehaving driver of one hardware components that caused the problem, unfortunately the driver wasn't updated yet so I couldn't fix the problem entirely, (disabling did help though)...

However you are using VMware thus a driver issue is, i think, rather unlikely. of course you never know.

< br > via < a class="StackLink" href=" http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3121/" >Why are SYSTEM and taskmgr.exe taking up 100% of my CPU?< /a>
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