CPU Usage

[jormungandr9]

Before I begin, here's my setup:
AMD Phenom II x4 955
Asus ATI HD6850
8Gb Mushkin Ram
Asus M4N75STD Mobo
WD Caviar Blue 500gb HDD

This is my first system, and I've noticed something strange. After about an hour or two of usage, both of my CPU monitoring gadgets (I use the CPU meter that comes with Win7 and All CPU Meter) show that my CPU usage is hovering around 50% to 70% on idle. It usually happens after a game or a long period of time on the internet. Closing these programs does not reduce CPU usage. After boot up, normal idle usage is around 2% to 4% and will maintain if left alone. When the problem happens, and I use task manager to find out what's hogging my CPU, it says either Catalyst Control Center or explorer.exe is using around 20% each. How do I counter this, and are these applications the actual cause? Would restarting them w/o rebooting them help.

 

[iPwn]

You could always try killing the processes and then restarting them. I personally disable the catalyst control center as it doesn't serve much of a purpose. Explorer shouldn't remain at a high usage percentage during system idle. When you kill that and then restart, how does that effect the CPU usage?

 

[markleo1]

It shouldn't be any higher than 2-3%. Do you have anti virus on your computer? If so, it's probably scanning random files, making sure your computer is healthy. If you don't have anti virus, that is a sign of a virus. My CPU also spikes to 30% when Avast scans random crap.