Why is "System Idle Process" hogging up CPU when watching Netflix?

Question

For a week or so now whenever I attempt to watch Netflix on my laptop it will periodically become fairly unresponsive while still playing audio. After a little while I opened task manager to monitor the cpu usage of the various processes I have running and noticed that "System Idle Process" jumps whenever it slows down. This also only seems to happen when I am watching Netflix as I have tried it with both Chrome and the new version of IE.

So I guess I'm kinda just wondering if there is any simple fix for this. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

Its not System Idle Process but its your processor, its not fast enough.



You can see that something called "System Idle Process" is taking up a full 92% of my CPU's resources.



Seems like a lot, so what's up with that?



The fact is that most computers can never really do nothing. When the computer is on, the CPU's running and it must do something - even if that "something" is waiting for something real to do.



Think of it as your computer just twiddling its virtual thumbs, waiting for something more important to do. The computer's doing something (virtual thumb twiddling), but we wouldn't call that doing anything useful.



That's called being idle.



And the "System Idle Process" is the software that runs when the computer has absolutely nothing better to do.



It effectively runs at the lowest possible priority so that if anything, anything at all, comes along for the CPU to work on, it can. When there's nothing left to do, back to idle it goes.



So having the System Idle Process using 90% of your CPU is a good thing ... it means that that 90% is readily availble should there be any real work to do.

Answer 2

The system idle process only occurs when your system is idle, hence the name...so that means you have plenty of processing power to spare. The problem likely isn't your processor, but rather your graphics card. Try getting an better graphics card, or you can turn down the pixel density of your screen, or turn of aero effects or any othwr graphics intensive settings.

Answer 3

'System Idle Process' doesn't hog your CPU. If it says like 98% then it simply means your computer is 98% idle. In other words, your computer system is 2% busy.