[Solved] Vista jumps to 100% cpu when switching to battery mode

I am running Vista Home Premium (which I upgraded several months ago from the Vista Basic that came installed on my Acer 3680-2022). This laptop has 1.5 GB RAM.

After any full boot the system will crawl if it is running on battery (and I do not know if this is the culprit but csrss.exe is doing plenty of I/O Reads).

If I plug in AC power the system immediately jumps back to normal. Pull out AC power and system resumes its crawl, andCPU becomes 100%.

If csrss.exe is the culprit (note that this does not appear to be a trojan/virus version of csrss.exe) then exactly what is it doing after every cold startup? And while it is running then why does my system crawl (as in the general system response goes from 1 second to 30 seconds for everything) when I switch to battery mode?

I also have tried turning offall screen saver and battery management options but these had no effect. Any suggestions? If I never use the battery I can live with the performance, but what is triggering the 100% cpu utilization when I switch to battery mode?

 

I have no idea what is causing it. What happens when you task kill the exe? Also on task manager list programs by cpu usage, you should see what exeusing most of the cpu.

 

Issue resolved. A"disable power management" posting for Windows 2999/XP athttp://www.joryanick.com/fixingCSRSS.htm also addressed my Vista laptop problem.

I had suspected power management may have been the culprit, but although I had tweaked my "High Performance" power profile to never turn off the display nor the system, I had neglected to actually select that "High Performance" radio button - hence I was still running with power management in effect.

Apparantly thisreferenced blurb was right on and Vista on my laptop ended up spending so much time trying to be power efficient that it was "black hole-ing" my system's resources. That paradox obviously doesn't make sense to me from an engineering view but at least by completely disabling power management that seems to be an effective workaround.

 

Glad to hear you got it fixed!