What is a normal CPU range for total usage?

[Angrboda]

I am figuring out that my new audio card is hogging my cpu. When audio is running my CPU is at about 55-80 bouncing around that range mostly in the high 60s to mid 70s. Is that ok to allow to run for long periods?

When I shut down a SVhost file in my task manager the CPU disconnects it until I reboot, but the CPU USAGE drops to under 10% total CPU usage.

Would adding memory sticks to it, because it has expansion slots for more memory, would that help reduce the work on the CPU?

We'd need to know more about your system to answer. Specifically, what apps are you running at the time? Typically? What hardware: cpu, memory, chipset, audio hardware, and operating system? And more specific figures on how much the sound system is contributing toward the load. Google "task manager replacements" for a selection of free task managers which can give more precise feedback. Two that I use are, 'process explorer' (Microsoft freebie), Iarsn's taskinfo (shareware with nag screen timeout after first 30 days).

If your sound card is causing a cpu usage jump of more than 15-20%, it's a problem. A fair system should only use up to 5% or so for the sound hardware overhead.


Svchost generally covers multiple services and you generally don't want to kill it, as it's a main windows process. You need to figure what specifically svchost (that instance) is running under it. There will be one svchost process which has all the basic networking services and inter-process communication running under it; that's often the one hogging cpu, and the proper approach to fixing it is to determine which sub-processes that it is running are using too much cpu and fix those, as well as disabling any unnecessary services running under that instance of svchost (generally best left to the experts). (Tools like tasklist [default with windows] are useful in this task, as well as the command line oriented service management tools. If you have a decent cpu, I wouldn't worry about 50-60% cpu load unless things seem unusually slow or lagging or freezing up intermittently.)

(ETA: I also need to know if there has been a major hardware change recently. I seem to recall you saying that you transplanted the windows from one hardware setup to another. Doing that generally requires massaging some kinks out of the base of windows. I could instruct you in that, but the most cost effective in terms of total time involved versus result is usually just to reinstall windows and software clean.)