My gf is using a Dell Vostro for her daily job. She complained to me that the laptop's operation is sometimes sluggish. I've checked whether she is using power-hungry softwares like Matlab & whatnot but there are none. She usually using Winamp, some Word documents & that's about it.

To my surprise, I've checked the laptop's CPU usage & it's showing 51-54% usage even though there's no softwares running at all. I've tried to clear any vague running softwares in the background but still the cpu usage still above 50%. Could it be that the Dell built-in monitoring systems are causing the CPU usage to run so high??

Anybody got any idea on this issue? Thanks for helping out.

well, issit Vista??

if yes, then most probably it's indexing or Superfetch in work in the background...

Vista makes use of idle resources to do all these stuff to make ur computer run better and smoother in the future...

then how come its sluggish?

are u sure there's no spyware or anything like that?

which model of Vostro?

i am using vostro 1200..so far i dun face any problem like u mention...

get the systinternal's process explorer locate which program occupied high cpu usage

check the power management mode
recently i did a silly mistake that i changed the power management mode to silent office mode
so my cpu frequency was limited at 33%
i still thought it was vista fault that make my lappy laggy
until i found this mistake and fixed it
my lappy is running smoother now

we need more details

CPU type?
RAM capacity?
OS?
using what kind of anti-virus software?

Thread Moved from Mobile Computing

This isn't a laptop related issue but rather something got to do with the system or the software. I'll be moving the thread here whereby you can get some replies from the experts

saying abt power management, i also got enquiry, what is the different btw laptop/notebook, max battery, minimal management etc etc in there???

adjusted to lowest & highest CPU speed automatically, eg: intel speed step technology

brightness + standby the harddisk to save more battery life

Ok i've got the model series.

Dell Vostro 1400
Intel Core DUo
2GB RAM
OS: Windows XP
Anti-virus: NOD32..dunno what brand is this. Whenever I wanted to update this, the softwares ask me for user & password, which my gf doesnt know huhuhu.

Abt the power management thingy, I will ask her to check & change to normal one.

This post has been edited by Zaryl: Sep 9 2008, 05:22 AM

Ahh, it has been quite a while not posting anything in Technical Support forum. Wow, so many people are in vain, trying to get their problems solved.

Well, I have Vostro 1400 with the some specs (as shown in my signature), except in some applications which may be different that your sister's. I don't use NOD32 for my antivirus and malware solution. I use only Avast! Antivirus and Spybot Search & Destroy (SSD) which I always keep them up-to-date. The component in SSD called TeaTimer.exe (which is running in user mode) normally shows a high memory usage but less dependent on CPU when there is no activity. Avast! Antivirus components which has prefix "ash" in their process name, use some memory but they don't exhibit high CPU usage.

Usually, FF3 is the one exhibits highest memory footprint but less on CPU when it is not active.

Here is my current Vostro 1400 system usage with 85 processes:



Try to see which processes are exhibiting higher CPU usage. Go to Processes in the Windows Task Manager and descending sort the CPU column by clicking on the column. Don't worry about high CPU usage by System Idle Process because that is the default idle process counter when some processes are idle.

This post has been edited by eclectice: Sep 10 2008, 05:28 PM