Hmmmmm. Running XP and doing some Sage/ODBC (ugh) stuff this am. Since then, the PC's disk just won't stop doing things. What though, I can't say.

Task manager reports System Idle Process at 20 CPU usage whilst everything else is at 0, 1 or 2.

What can I check?

Cheers

Lee.

 

The system idle process is just using up unused CPU slices. It's normal for it to use processor time.

What settings do you have for your virtual memory? It's possible windows is just paging something out to disk.

Another possibility is that if you have Windows set to manage the size of your virtual memory, that for some reason it is resizing it on disc.

Den

 

Usually a sign of limited pagefile, or lack of disk space or needs a good defrag.

 

Hmmm, could be disk space. Down to 22% free. Time to (a) defrag and (b) upgrade.

Thx

L.

 

Also.....something i'm not sure on is... of the OS's that use pagefiles ie NT , 2000, XP..i'm not sure if the pagefile size is taken into account when reporting free space.
I'm sure that on NT i have seen instances that it hasnt.
This may have been fixed on subsequent service packs.

Sorry to ramble... it basically means your "free space" has been
taken up by a page file which is now overflowing.

The only way I found this out (on NT 4); was when using a 3rd party defrag tool. System reporting X Mb free space, but actually none.

 

I had this recently and it was my damn virus scanner running a scheduled scan (but no indication of this) . I doubt this is your case tho.