100% CPU useage? heh!?

[slipper]

ok macrumors people. i noticed this happens on my new powerbook a lot. every once in a while my computer will run really really sluggish with the computer ridiculously hot and fans on full blast. and nothing will stop the CPU from running at full speed. nothing besides restarting. so anyways, it just happened again when i was away from my computer. no programs were running, it was just idling. activity monitor was showing that its running at 100% CPU usage. whats going on?

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

Are you, by any chance, running folding- or seti@home...?

Or have a demanding screen saver running, like Flurry...?

 

[slipper]

nothing. no applications, no screen saver running, no folding, nothing.

 

[tekmoe]

i noticed sometimes my mail.app will eat up all the cpu power anywhere from 30 seconds to 3 minutes. my fans don't come on though, as it's probably not enough time to get the cpu hot.

 

[HiRez]

My dual G5 cranks up for take off every time an animated GIF is loaded onscreen in Safari. I'd like to say it's insignificant but when the environmental noise floor is low it can be pretty jarring/annoying. Also cranks up when playing games, particularly OpenGL games, but that's more understandable. I have to think loading a little animated GIF should use less than several tens of millions of CPU cycles.

 

[wilmor42]

same problem

funny thing.. i had the same problem the other day on my powerbook too, no apps running and 100% cpu usage shown.. do u own a HP printer by any chance? i found an app running in my activity monitor, i dont remember what it was called exactly but it began with HP... and it was hogging 80% of the cpu usage, so i shut it down and no probs ever since.. i think i'd connected and disconnected my printer several times one night and the next day safari wouldnt do jack and thats when i thought something was wrong-seeing as my current uptime at the time was about 29 days without a hitch..

 

[Russellosbor]

Open Firmware

I had this probelm with an old B/W g3 450 mhz. Tried everything from wiping the system and reinstalling programs. Nothing worked. I stummbled across some commands in open firmware to TRUELY reset the firmware.
(CMD OPT o f) on reboot to start open firmware
enter the following in the same order

reset-nvram
set-defaults
reset-all

and hit return it will flash the motherboard and restart.

Hope it helps sped the B/W right up.

 

[Jo-Kun]

My dual G5 cranks up for take off every time an animated GIF is loaded onscreen in Safari. I'd like to say it's insignificant but when the environmental noise floor is low it can be pretty jarring/annoying. Also cranks up when playing games, particularly OpenGL games, but that's more understandable. I have to think loading a little animated GIF should use less than several tens of millions of CPU cycles.

since I set my CPU's to Highest the fans don't rev for takeoff I mean allmost never! they only go faster when the temp in my studio goes up... and a little noisier then when set on automatic, but allways at the same speeds, if I set it to automatic, they rev up all the time, just touching anything in Photoshop, I was kinda irritated by it and now that's gone ;-)

it's a G5 thing ;-)