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Trying to figure out why my MacBook Pro is idling at 60% cpu in XP
LoneIgadzra
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I've done virus scans and disabled indexing and everything, no results. All task manager says is 30% is being used by the process "System" with the other 30% a mystery.
Needless to say, idling at 60% cpu is completely unacceptable for a laptop, especially one that already runs hot.
This process seems to be low priority at least, since it doesn't reduce game framerates.
Anyone got any suggestions?
MacBook Pro, 2.16 GHz, Radeon X1600 gimped (128MB), Windows XP SP3 with all updates, .NETs, and everything, Boot Camp 2.1 drivers, with mobility modded catalyst 8.7 for video (to make OpenGL work, which is not the case with the latest official boot camp drivers which are 8.4).
Also why in god's name does add/remove programs list three different versions of every driver, presumably once for every time I've installed a new version of Boot Camp. It's disturbing. Should I just format or some shit? God knows I just use this partition for gaming, backing up doesn't matter.
I have a shitton of other random Boot Camp problems too, like when I boot it up with a firewire hard drive plugged in, instead of loading my desktop it just shows a completely black screen for like 10 minutes.
Needless to say, idling at 60% cpu is completely unacceptable for a laptop, especially one that already runs hot.
This process seems to be low priority at least, since it doesn't reduce game framerates.Anyone got any suggestions?
MacBook Pro, 2.16 GHz, Radeon X1600 gimped (128MB), Windows XP SP3 with all updates, .NETs, and everything, Boot Camp 2.1 drivers, with mobility modded catalyst 8.7 for video (to make OpenGL work, which is not the case with the latest official boot camp drivers which are 8.4).
Also why in god's name does add/remove programs list three different versions of every driver, presumably once for every time I've installed a new version of Boot Camp. It's disturbing. Should I just format or some shit? God knows I just use this partition for gaming, backing up doesn't matter.
I have a shitton of other random Boot Camp problems too, like when I boot it up with a firewire hard drive plugged in, instead of loading my desktop it just shows a completely black screen for like 10 minutes.
LoneIgadzra on
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95% of the problems I've had with Vista on my MBP have been caused by Apple software.
Also, the last time I tried to uninstall Boot Camp it wouldn't let me and things got ugly from there, resulting in about three formats and retries at installing XP.
Wow that's awesome, I guess they were so busy creating the World's Most Advanced Operating System™ that they forgot to QA their own fucking driver kit. But then I suppose their products are just so amazing that they don't need to test for scenarios in which someone might decide not to use said amazing software.
If you manage to fix this I suggest getting InputRemapper which will replace a couple of the Apple drivers, and the Boot Camp control panel, with superior ones. It even enables the automatic backlight functionality from OS X.
MySQL was not the CPU problem, since it was the first thing I tried killing and I didn't have it autolaunching on startup; I just turn it on when I need it for software development. Indeed, it was just about the only stable piece of software on this POS.
Input Remapper huh? I'll see how that works. Last time when I tried to uninstall Apple drivers, half of them would say NO U CAN'T and other half would uninstall and them come right back the next time I rebooted. By the time I was done messing with safe mode (no idea how I got to it) and a bunch of other shit my installation was hopelessly fucked. Maybe I should try the device manager instead of add/remove programs?
Edit: oh hey it uninstalls them automagically. Hooray!
Also what is the deal with Boot Camp 2.1 and why do I have to install 2.0 first? That's bullshit and I don't trust Apple's updater in the least since all the old drivers are still in add/remove programs.
The reason it's doing that is Microsoft staggers service pack downloads via Automatic Updates because they want to conserve bandwidth, and they figure most home users won't care about getting the latest service pack right away, and the ones who do care can just google it and get the manual installer.
InputRemapper will automatically remove certain relevant Apple drivers when you install it. Just install the latest Boot Camp and then InputRemapper over top of it and it should do its thing. Best not to try "helping" it in any way because that will most likely fuck it up again.
You should do Service Pack 3 before you install anything else though.
Count me in too. :P I need to run Windows for all the .NET coding I have to do.
Actually though, my XP partition just got totally fucking corrupted a couple days ago, so I trashed it and am gonna reinstall XP in a day or two. Perfect timing mentioning this Input Remapper program, as it sounds pretty awesome. Thanks in advance!
Check out this laundry list of Boot Camp bugs that five seconds of testing could have dug out:
You get the idea.
I'm also glad to hear I'm not the only one whose MacBook Pro is suddenly waking up from the off state without warning.
The process monitor log shows this pattern over and over again (these same lines make up 90% of the log output):
Aside from all the normal stuff I'd expect from the apps I have running. Googling the service names has turned up nothing conclusive, though personally I bet it's Apple. Who else could write a bunch of shitty services that fuck up Windows?
DaemonTools is also a possibility I suppose, though I made sure to isolate its installation so I could tell if it messed anything up. Likewise with my my video drivers (catalyst 8.7 run through MobiltyModder).
Update: I have now eliminated Quicktime, MySQL, video drivers, game cube controller adapter drivers, and search indexing as possible culprits. Also, after disabling my video drivers from the device manager, all my tray icons for network stuff disappeared and won't come back. I love Windows.
Update 2: Yeah fuck this shit. Explorer.exe keeps hanging everything up when I try to shut down, so I click "End Now" and 10 minutes later the laptop still hasn't shut off. Also DaemonTools wasn't the problem either. I'm returning to the blissful ignorance of Leopard for a while.
It's probably some combination of my unsanctioned video drivers with some other shitty driver and a full moon.
Edit: oh fuck I hate when I have to call microsoft to activate it, I wish the voice recognition thing would work just once but I always end up talking to some indian lady who asks me pointed questions about how many computers I have this copy installed on
You can track CPU usage by thread (since the system process is multi-threaded) to see what exactly is causing the issue. I had a win2k3 box at work that had the system process using 100% of the CPU. The USB driver was doing it.
Yeah, so I still can't make this happen again. Which is cool, but... I will have to maintain extreme installation vigilance until something fucks up my DPCs so I know exactly what I did.
Is that really how you see Windows on a Mac even when using BC? I thought it would be fullscreen and native, not run in app
Yo don't let your imagination run away with you. The whole point of "Boot" Camp is to "Boot" into Windows and run it natively like a "real" PC. He's just using a virtual machine, vmware by the look of it.
All Boot Camp really is is an EFI module that BIOS compatibility. Then there's a separate little app called the Boot Camp Assistant, which will help you non-destructively repartition your HD. It'll also restart your machine and tell it to boot from the DVD drive. Then you just go through the Windows installer like you would on any other machine, select your new partition, and go for it.
You can avoid using the Assistant app if you like, and use diskutil via the command line to do all your partitioning. But there isn't really anyway to stop windows using the little BIOS module to help it boot... because if it did, it wouldn't work.
I kinda wish I had something to contribute to the actual topic... but all the bases seem to be about covered. Sorry for the off topic-ness of my posts..
Alas, I'd let Input Remapper manage my screen brightness and such, but the light sensor every so often does this thing where it drops to zero for a flash and then the screen practically turns off because Input Remapper doesn't correct for it.
Where are the light sensors anyway? Maybe I got a crumb in it.
Well, I've been cruising with this installation for a while now, so I'm gonna go ahead and blame DaemonTools tunneling bullshit for conflicting with an apple driver or something. Microsoft's virtual CD control panel doesn't handle as many image formats, which is a bit troublesome (I have some images I made with CloneCD to avoid having to bring game discs with me on the go), but it'll do I guess.
For disk images I prefer Alcohol 52%, it supports as many formats as Daemon, and as an added bonus it doesn't look like someone took a shit on their keyboard and called it image mounting software.
Just pop the battery out and presto - cpu use down to normal. Hope this helps someone. I don't know solution that lets you retain full battery functionality in Windows, but other people have the same problem:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8120596
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7224691
I have seen some rumors that rebooting into OS X and back will fix it, as will disabling "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery" in the device manager. (I have tested this, and it fixes the cpu use issue, and if you unplug the power accidentally the battery will still work, so that's probably the best way to go.)