~25% CPU usage while idle; problems arose after coming out of sleep mode.

Question

~25% CPU usage while idle; problems arose after coming out of sleep mode.

Anonymous

EDIT// just an update. as i mentioned in my first post i also had error with the Intel RST. i found the answer here: http://communities.intel.com/thread/16881. changing my SATA in BIOS should fix my problem, which is caused by an error between Intel drivers and BIOS. just in case anyone else has this problem.

i'll start with some system specs:

Window 7 Home Premium | 64-bit
Intel Core i5 CPU | 650 at 3.20 GHz (Quad)
ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series
8 GB of DDR3 RAM
Microsoft Security Essentials

basically, my problem is that my CPU usage hovers around 25% while only the task manager is running. it's a concern to me because my processor/fans sound like they are running much harder than normal. to be more specific, when i used to boot my computer it would sound like it was working hard then die down once Windows was starting - now it never leaves that "working hard" state as far as the sounds it's making. i can't remember what my PCU usage used to hover around when i would check it from time-to-time, but i feel like it was much lower than ~25% and the computer was certainly quieter. also, my system tray says my Intel RST is not running - i only have one hard drive and haven't implemented any sort of raid configuration - and when i right-click it and select "open application", i get a prompt that says "IAStorUI has stopped working" before it disappears.

as far as i know, these problems arose when my computer left sleep mode. i say "as far as i know" because my girlfriend is the one who both put it to sleep and woke it up while i was at work, so i didn't see exactly what error messages happened. i believe it was something along the lines of "an error has occurred while trying to leave sleep mode"; she tried booting it into safe mode, and i believe she got messages about the computer having trouble returning to it's normal state - so she then turned my PC off because she didn't want to select anything that may damage it. when i got home i finished booting it, and selected the prompts that said they would return my computer to the normal state, despite irregularities that it may cause. sorry if this is all too vague or hard to follow.

i tried following the advice listed here, even though most of the issues in those forums were in regard to laptops. i have tried basically all the varieties of fixing the hiberfil.sys file (i believe that is what it's called) in case it was corrupted - running command prompt as an administrator then typing

powercfg [-h][-hibernate][/h][/hibernate] [off][on]

the brackets indicating what i tried at different times, with all sorts of restarts in between and finally one with a disk defragment in the middle. i believe i can safely say it is not because my hiberfil.sys is corrupted. i really don't know what else to do, and the sound of my computer working hard when it shouldn't be is just a tad bit stressful.

any help/advice would be extremely helpful; thanks for your time.

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2 answers

Answer 1

thank you for the response. i forgot to mention that i had done a full reformat from a back-up image that was pretty recently captured - and it still did not fix the problem. as far as the methods you offered: the first method offered no solutions, i'm running a balanced power set-up and my auto-sleep/screen savers were already relatively power friendly; while i understand the second method is really just covering the bases and is more of an auto-response, it was also unhelpful, as i was using the performance statistics within the task manager to help determine that i had a problem in the first place; method three also yielded nothing conclusive. i performed a clean boot with all non-essential functions disabled, and my CPU usage/tower noise did not decrease - so i omitted the steps where you turn half of the services back on, and alternate, etc.

i'll be cleaning off/out all of my hardware next time i get the chance to get another air duster (it's pretty clean already, though not immaculate), but i'm fairly certain it's a software issue since a little dust in the fan would not increase CPU usage (to my knowledge). then again, i will also be checking physical connections to make sure nothing looks out of place or something.

again, i appreciate the response and welcome any other input. in the mean time i feel like i'm pretty much out of options as far as things i can find/do on my own. naturally i would love to get it back to running at around ~3% CPU usage idle or whatever it was; hopefully it is a bug/anomaly on the OS side of things that can be addressed/resolved.

EDIT// just an update. as i mentioned in my first post i also had error with the Intel RST. i found the answer here: http://communities.intel.com/thread/16881. changing my SATA in BIOS should fix my problem, which is caused by an error between Intel drivers and BIOS. just in case anyone else has this problem.