Vista (final) running at 50% CPU usage at all times

[Nomad]

Question for any of you running Vista - my CPU is sitting at 50% at all times - not sure why.

I am running a 570J (3.8Ghz P4 - with Hyperthreading). The real proc sits at ~90% usage while the HyperThreaded CPU runs at ~10%.

Come to find out FireFox was running still and it had some flash animation playing that was consuming resources like crazy - some sort of leak.

 

[Cabn12]

Have you tried using Resource Monitor in Vista? It can be very detailed. The UI shouldn't be using 50% of your CPU. Mine is at 0% when my PC is at idel.

 

[bbz_Ghost]

Did you happen to click the "Show processes from all users" in Task Manager to get the full list of what's going on? That might provide a clue, and Resource Monitor is a valuable tool as well.

Vista isn't an idle OS like all previous versions of Windows have been. The search feature will use what would normally be idle time to index the hard drive; this is pretty much a 24/7 thing depending on how much of the drive needs indexing.

The Vista Aero GUI doesn't use hardly any CPU resources, that's the whole point: it offloads almost the entire GUI process to your graphics card GPU so the OS is free to do other schtuffz without taking a performance hit of any noticeable amount with the pretty transparencies and 3D effects. Everything in Aero is technically rendered as a 3D texture sooo... I don't think that's what's causing the CPU usage to be so high unless the drivers are simply not effective or, as the case is so often, just damned buggy and useless.