Processor running at 100%

[Shakey]

I have pc that runs a Celeron 2.6Ghz processor on a VIA PM2MP mother board. It has onboard graphics (Savage S3 64mb) and 256mb ram. Being the newbie I am to understanding PC performance, I don't understand why my processor often runs at 100%. (I use XP professional)
Here is the typical scenario:

I open the task manager to monitor the performance
then i open, say Window media player 9 (WMP) - it opens quickly and starts playing as normal
If i move the WMP screen around quickly and continuously (Click and drag) on the desktop, the processor goes to 100% until i release the WMP screen.

Is this normal for the above specs? Is it a processor problem, a RAM problem (not enough) or do I need a graphics card? Maybe my PC is not configured properly. (I've defragmented and de-virussed everything possible)

It disconcerting seeing the processor struggling to simply move a window quickly across the screen
Any help would be much appreciated.

[Schmidget]

Hi and welcome to it's all PC!

It could be a combination of all three.

What is probably causing your CPU % to spike is explorer (the windows shell). Explorer is the user shell, which we see as the familiar taskbar, desktop, icons and so on. Explorer uses a lot of power, especially if you are working on the highest graphical settings for your GUI. For example: visual styles, drop shadows, showing window contents while dragging, etc.

A big problem is that you are using onboard graphics with a relatively low power CPU (not terrible though ). Your 2D and 3D work eats your CPU alive because a majority of the graphics processing is being dumped on it. This is what is causing your CPU to spike. This is made worse if you are running a visualization in media player, and attempting to move it around.

You could solve this by either upgrading your CPU or upgrading the graphics card to something with a good amount of 2D acceleration. You'd be suprised how much my little GeForce 4 MX 4000 ($30) had on the 2D performance of my mom's computer.

You are also running with the absolute bare minimum amount of RAM for your system. This isn't a good idea, as far as performance goes. If you have ever noticed a slowdown when switching between and closing out of programs, that would be why. Windows XP itself can hog upto 260MB. I would recommend that you upgrade to at least 512MB. This will give you a little more space for other apps you may have running.

If you wait a little longer, someone else may respond to this topic and help a little more than I.

[syphus]

Running at 100% when you're doing something is a good sign...would you perfer that your CPU only ran at say, 75%, indicating that despite the fact there's work to be done, the other potential 25% is just sitting there, doing nothing?

The came principal applies to RAM. Unused RAM is wasted RAM, that could be better used as file cache (Although, more than 100% RAM usage, spilling over onto page file is much worse).

Some operations are performed using low delay, low resolution, low priority isochronous timers. What this means is, a certain operation is performed over and over again, provided there is CPU time (%) to spare. An example of this is dragging a Window (when viewing window contents when dragging is enabled, especially in the case of transparency and alpha edges); the Window needs to be re-drawn over and over to update it's position, but only if there's CPU time to spare, otherwise it's a waste of resources. If you were running a number of applications that consumed say, 15% CPU time, as much as 85% would be consumed in such an operation, bringing the CPU load to 100% (Note that dual core and HT machines would only see a peak of 50%, since the operation is single threaded and Windows considers each logical core to account for an even percentage of the over all load).

It is a common and tragic misconception people have that disabling Windows' little extra visual tweaks will improve performance. Understanding how these features are implemented reveals that only slack resources are used to do these things. Try dragging a window while another application is consuming a lot of CPU time...nothing happens right? Because it's low priority. Don't be afraid of actually USING your processor

Such a thing is only an issue if you're starting to feel like your system is slow...that's when you might look toward doing something about it.

You may benefit from reading this thread.

[Shakey]

Thanks for the explanation guys (and the warm welcome) . At least now I know that their isn't something terminally wrong with my PC. Now I've just got to go about getting me that graphics card and some more RAM.