System Idle Process

[Steve Hayes]

Can anyone tell me what the SYSTEM IDLE PROCESS in Windows XP is and does?

After about half an hour of working on my computer it slows down, and takes an
age to respond to anything. The hard disk light shows that it is active, and
it looks as though something is using it and not letting any other program get
a look in.

When that happens I usually switch it off at the wall plug and reboot.

Today I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Delete to see if I could find what was causing this,
and there wasn't a program running other than ones I had started, but there
was a SYSTEM IDLE PROCESS that showed it was using about 75-95% of processor
bapacity and was presumably causing the disk to churm as well.

Does anyone have any idea what this System Idle Process is for, and why it
seems to consume so much in the way of computer resources. Is there any way of
stopping it, and would stopping it damage anything else?

[Char Jackson]

Post by Steve Hayes
Can anyone tell me what the SYSTEM IDLE PROCESS in Windows XP is and does?
After about half an hour of working on my computer it slows down, and takes an
age to respond to anything. The hard disk light shows that it is active, and
it looks as though something is using it and not letting any other program get
a look in.
When that happens I usually switch it off at the wall plug and reboot.
Today I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Delete to see if I could find what was causing this,
and there wasn't a program running other than ones I had started, but there
was a SYSTEM IDLE PROCESS that showed it was using about 75-95% of processor
bapacity and was presumably causing the disk to churm as well.
Does anyone have any idea what this System Idle Process is for, and why it
seems to consume so much in the way of computer resources. Is there any way of
stopping it, and would stopping it damage anything else?

It's not actually a process, in the usual sense of the word. It's a
placeholder to show how much CPU capacity is currently available. When it
shows 75-95%, your CPU is currently very lightly loaded, using only 5-25% of
its capacity.

You say the disk is churning...what does your memory utilization look like?
Perhaps the system is paging out RAM to the disk-based pagefile. If so,
adding RAM should help significantly.

BTW, it's quite ill advised to kill the power at the wall plug versus doing
a normal shutdown.

[VanguardLH]

Post by Steve Hayes
Can anyone tell me what the SYSTEM IDLE PROCESS in Windows XP is and does?
After about half an hour of working on my computer it slows down, and takes an
age to respond to anything. The hard disk light shows that it is active, and
it looks as though something is using it and not letting any other program get
a look in.
When that happens I usually switch it off at the wall plug and reboot.
Today I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Delete to see if I could find what was causing this,
and there wasn't a program running other than ones I had started, but there
was a SYSTEM IDLE PROCESS that showed it was using about 75-95% of processor
bapacity and was presumably causing the disk to churm as well.
Does anyone have any idea what this System Idle Process is for, and why it
seems to consume so much in the way of computer resources. Is there any way of
stopping it, and would stopping it damage anything else?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Idle_Process