CPU Activity Usage 78%

My computer has been running incredibly slowly recently so I decided to check my Activity Monitor to see what was up. Even when all I am running is iTunes and Safari and not doing anything intensive on either, the CPU System usage is 78%! I have plenty of free memory and hard drive space so I don't know what is going on. I should probably say my internal battery ran dry recently so I've been using it plugged for the past few days if that could be a contributing factor.

Please help. My computer is crawling just trying to post this.

And what app/process is using the CPU?

1st thing to try is always a re-boot.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand your question.

I have tried rebooting but it's only about a minute until it's back at 78%. How many threads is it normal to have active? It says I have 312. A lot of the things listed in Activity Monitor are things I don't even recognize, in lowercase and without any icons.

Press the CPU button at the top of the list - possibly twice - to reorder the list based on CPU percentage so you can find out what process is actually using the CPU.

Just telling us it's using 78% tells us nothing without know "what" is using it.

Well I already said all I have running is iTunes and Safari in my first post, but okay.

iTunes = ~28%
Safari = ~8%
Activity Monitor = ~3%

Below those three are the aforementioned lowercase, icon-less items that I'm not familiar with. There's quite a few of them but they're all 0.0%.

There should be an option to show "all processes" instead of "my processes", and you can also run the "top" command from Terminal to get a list of processes.

Okay... kernel_task is at ~300%.

Sounds like it may be hardware/driver related...any odd errors in Console? Bad batteries have been known to trigger the same symptoms, try removing the battery with it plugged in and see what happens.

revengeonart said:

Well I already said all I have running is iTunes and Safari in my first post, but okay.

iTunes = ~28%
Safari = ~8%
Activity Monitor = ~3%

Click to expand...

revengeonart said:

Okay... kernel_task is at ~300%.

Click to expand...

Next time be a bit more patient and understanding...sometimes we do know what we're talking about!

- Nick