Feed Me! Feed Me Now!
No, it's not Audrey, the carnivorous plant in Little Shop Of Horrors; it was ravenous software consuming a reader's CPU cycles and making his machine crawl. We covered possible causes and cures in "What's Eating His CPU Cycles" ( http://langa.com/newsletters/2006/2006-01-12.htm#3 ) and again in "More CPU-Hungry Software" http://langa.com/newsletters/2006/2006-01-16.htm#7 .
Here's more on what may be the culprit; and a nice (free) tool for further diagnosis:
Hi Fred, I was reading the Article "What's Eating his CPU Cycles". Stu mentioned he is running SpeedUpMyPC. I recently bought this product and am now having the problem. 100 CPU usage for long periods of time. I finally uninstalled the program and the problem went away. It also made a mess of my cable modem, network and system setting I'm still sorting out. Regards, Tom
Ooooo, that looks very suspicious indeed, Tom. I haven't used SpeedUpMyPC myself. (And I certainly won't now! <g>)
Fred - for Stu Godwin, who needed help determining what was using so many CPU cycles - you have probably talked about this before, but a great tool is Process Explorer from http://www.sysinternals.com. When minimized to the system tray, it gives a little graph of CPU usage for the past few minutes, and it will display the total, and the task using the MOST processor, if you hover the mouse cursor over the tray icon. Of course, the full display has lots of extra features, including I/O activity (often a cause of slowdowns worse that high CPU usage), and the description and manufacturer of many of your programs and services. And the BEST feature - it's free! ---Dan Kronstadt
Nice Dan, thnx!
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