Acer Laptop, CPU usage very high

Jafin

Hey guys,
I got an Acer Aspire 6930G in May and have had nothing but praise for it until now. Its not really even a major problem, just the last few days the CPU usage for both cores has been unusually high just when I have Safari and Internet Explorer open. (Yes I know Im weird using 2 separate browsers, dont judge me! :P)

Usually there would be liek 2 tabs open in IE and a max of 3/4 open in Safari. The only other programs id have open would be Skype and MSN, just in the background and not being used all the time.

I have a 2.0 GHz processor, an Intel T5800 I think, with 2 cores.
On my sidebar I have a meter thingy which monitors both Core's usage and the RAM usage.

I know having several YouTube pages open at once hampers the performance due to all the videos, but I dont usually have more than one open at a time in case anybody was going to ask me.

The webpages usually open in IE are my hotmail account and my Gmail account. In the Safari one it would just be a social networking site and then whatever im browsing myself.

Of course at this moment Im being made out to be a liar as I have 3 pages open in IE and one in Safari and the usage for both cores are 32% and 51% with RAM at 54%. My RAM is 3 gigs.

I dont know what else to say and probly have a lot of unneccesary info already written, so I do apologise.

On a side not I use TuneUp Utilities 2009 to clear away any unneccessary files that I dont need, just wondering would that have gotten rid of something by accident that effects my performance?

Any help greatly appreciated and thanks in advance.

Overheal

Vista Sidebar is gay - there, I said it.

Download this much betterer alternative. It will tell you exactly what is causing the chokepoint in your CPU as well.

http://www.moo0.com/?top=http://www.moo0.com/software/SystemMonitor/

In its rightclick menu go to Fields and select Bottleneck + anything that says Loader on it. eg. CPU Loader, HDD Loader. These fields monitor which processes are putting the most load on your components.

But in my own view the amount of stuff you have open is ridiculous:

- among other things IE is a hog, which can be much better serviced by Either Safari, Chrome or Firefox.
- Messengers can all be replaced by the All-in-One programs such as Digsby.
- Youtube and Gmail both use Flash and Java Extensively. Make sure these plugins are up to date.
- You can link your Hotmail and Gmail accounts, and send and receive mail from one as if it was sent from the other. eg. you can send mail from gmail, using your hotmail name. Heres How.
- Make sure you are running in High Performance.
- The vista sidebar I've discovered is an inefficiently coded piece of shyte: disable it.

Jafin

I know a lot of people hate it, I only use it to keep an eye on my usage.

Thanks for the link I'll check it out now.

Overheal

If thats the only app you use on it, then moo0 will sort you out much better, using much less of your system resources.

Jafin

But.....its completely ugly. I suppose Id have to compromise looks for performance. Where exactly does it tell me whats going wrong? I see a bunch of numbers and words I dont understand so Im just editing it down to CPU usage and such.

Overheal

In the menu under View you can change skins and transparency and all that heffalump. I like Black/Khaki/Indigo. Mouse wheel affects font size.

You want Bottleneck, CPU1, CPU2, CPU Loader, Memory, Mem Swap, HDD Loader, HDD Busy, Network (I use Network In and Network Out) Connections, Processes

/breathe

Oh and Digsby does email alerts too, so you dont need to keep checking your hotmail and gmail all day long.

Jafin

Oh I dont check em all day like, I just like to leave them open for some reason so I can get there quicker if I get a new email....I dont know why.

Anywho thank you VERY much for your help, Ive opened all them things like you said and closed down the rest, changed the skin et.c and now its much prettier and less cluttered.

CPU usage is also now unusually low, maybe it was that damn sidebar all along....

Although the problems did start when I started using Safari more often. Maybe that was one of the contributors.

Anyway, thanks again. Much appreciated.

Overheal

yep. anytime. Im here all week :pac:

Voodu Child

Make sure you've got all the recent Vista updates, because the resource useage of Sidebar was cut a lot with one of them (SP2 if I recall). It's not really the hog now that people make it out to be any more, unless you've got dozens of widgets on it. I don't use it, but i opened it out of curiosity and its using 2% of the CPU, with half-a-dozen widgets. Nothing much to worry about.

But anyway, aside from all the good advice above, i'd install CCleaner, and use it to kill an uneccessary startup programs. There's a lot of rubbish like Adobe updaters, Acrobat quickstarters, Quicktime crap, etc. They all try to install themselves to run as soon as you turn the computer on, so they're all sitting in the background wasting resources.

Its probably not really relevant, but if you've got a few mail accounts, you might be better off with a mail client like Windows Live mail, instead of keeping a rake of browser windows open. It'll manage all your mail accounts and fetch new e-mails at regular intervals.

Overheal

Quicktime and Quickstarters are more of an issue for msconfig. Uninstalling them outright usually means uninstalling Adobe/Quicktime, which is generally not preferable seeing as how their so handy on the interweb

Again for sidebar, grand if you use several of the widgets, but just for the diagnostic, why use it? Sidebar's CPU gauge is to Moo0 what The Stork Story is to Sex Education.