System idle Process shows 100% cpu usage

[Mind It]

When I'm working away on my computer, it seems that every so often the computer would become idle for a moment, as though it was waiting for something (perhaps an interrupt or some kind of system service?) to complete. At the bottom of the Task Manager the total CPU usage for all tasks is shown. When the system idle process CONTRIBUTES to this total is where the problem exists. When I bring up the Windows Task Manager, I found that the System Idle Process is often consuming 100% of the CPU usage. What i need to do in order to resolve the above issue? Any one knows about it? Please help me out to resolve the above issue. Thanks.

[Devasis]

Looking at the task manager at idle, System Idle Process is at 99. I have 40 processes running, and a CPU usage hovering around 35%. Are you using RAID? If so, if you lock up youll have corrupted files, when you reboot the system will use the IDLE process to inizialize and restore the mirror. If you look in the task manager processes tab and sort by CPU usage (click on the CPU column heading to toggle sort by most / least CPU usage), which process is hogging all the CPU when this happens (System Idle Process doesn't count)?

[Solomon]

You want high numbers in the system idle process. The higher the number, the less other tasks are using the CPU. It's not "using" up CPU cycles. Hit ctrl-alt delete click the processes tab, check under CPU, if everything is right system idle process should be taking the majority of your cpu.

[MrChris-]

You were in the "Applications" tab, you need to click on the "Processes" tab. Even on a clean, properly functioning install there will be quite a few processes running. There are times when task manager will misrepresent the total processor usage as well over 100% constantly. This is usually caused by one of three things in my experience: Bad DriversMalware on the system Click the CPU column header to sort them by CPU usage and see which ones are using the most CPU.