Longhorn 4074 fries my CPU :-(

Well, I got that fantastic Dell Inspiron 8600c (Pentium M 2GHz, 2 GB RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro Turbo w/ 128MB video memory) which runs XP in Virtual PC faster than most of my other machines do on hardware, so I thought this would be the perfect machine for the WinHEC Longhorn build, incl. DWM and such. Imagine my surprise when (after the usual struggle with drivers) I noticed that it was slow and jerky. Disabled WinFS (the obvious suspect :-), no change. Taskmanager then revealed what was happening:

 

Whatever process I am launching, total CPU usage always sums up to >99%, there seems to be no idle task. The performance tab shows more information:

 

So most of the CPU cycles are used by the kernel. WTH is happening here? I'm clueless... Any ideas appreciated :-)

(Interestingly, one of my other machines also happens to be a 8600, with Pentium M 1.5GHz, and there, 4074 runs perfectly well. So I'm puzzled even more.)

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2004
  this picture shows that actually the taskmanager eats up your cpu time ;]
• Anonymous
  June 24, 2004
  Ahh, actually no, this is just a coincidence. The most active tasks are sharing the 100% CPU usage among them:
  
  <img src="http://www.winisp.net/fprengel/images/taskman2.jpg">
• Anonymous
  June 24, 2004
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  June 24, 2004
  Try throwing Seti@Home on there, see if it'll be a virtual System Idle Process. Plus, on a machine like that, it'd be a shame to waste all those CPU cycles ;-)
• Anonymous
  June 24, 2004
  install the virtual machine addons
• Anonymous
  June 24, 2004
  See if the Winterals Process Explorer will run on LH. It will break out/sort CPU times by process.
  
  At least that will narrow it down.
• Anonymous
  June 25, 2004
  Simon: Thanks for this great suggestion - yes, it seems to be a driver running amok. Let's see if I can hunt him down...
  
  Art: I'm not running this in a VPC. Makes no sense if you want to see Avalon + DWM in its full beauty :-)
  
  Adam: You mean Sysinternals? I'll give it a try, thanks.
• Anonymous
  June 25, 2004
  Ahh, just found out (thanks to Process Explorer) that I have
  
  %DPC Time > 90
  
  :-(
  
  Deferred Procedure Calls. How do I find out which driver is causing this???
• Anonymous
  June 25, 2004
  Hah! Started disabling devices in device manager, and just the second attempt was successful - my Broadcom 440x 10/100 Integrated Controller was the bad boy! So I'm gonna find a more suitable driver.
  
  Thanks a lot to everyone who shared their suggestions - I highly appreciate it!
• Anonymous
  June 26, 2004
  Yeah I tried it also on my Inspiron 8600, and I just can't get the Broadcom 440x 10/100 Controller working.. I tried the driver from the Dell Support site as well as the WinXP and Win2k3 driver from the Broadcom site, all with no success. The strange thing is that it doesn't even seem to be that the driver is not signed, it just doesn't show any available models when I try to add a network adapter and use the driver's inf file. My Dell Truemobile 1300 Wireless adapter works fine, though.. Any ideas on how to get it working without having to use an external network PCMCIA card?
  
• Anonymous
  June 26, 2004
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  June 27, 2004
  I remember back in the days of the early Whistler betas, when lots of drivers were still missing and some guys even got a soundblaster driver working when no available driver was making a sound :-) I guess things like the broadcom driver issue right now are just a shadow of the storm that is to come, when they start enforcing the new Longhorn driver model and even most of the XP drivers won't work anymore.
  
  I always loved playing around with those builds, and to a certain degree I try to get some things working, but I don't have a problem waiting for the next build when it will work (and other things break...) :-)
  
• Anonymous
  July 28, 2004
  yea this build (installed normally) seems faster and more stable, but doesnt work with any of my motherboard drivers. Most of them install (manually), but then it gives me errors that the device failed to start. Guess ill have to wait for another build.
• Anonymous
  July 29, 2004
  This website cured the problem for me; it lists all unneeded or CPu heavy lh4074 features.
  
  http://www.nextl3vel.net/Chris123NT/4074/LHGuide.html
• Anonymous
  August 05, 2004
  i have a asus kav delux i was runnning xp 64 and all the 64 drivers i had worked but in longhorn the only one to work is the nvida 64 driver can anyone tell me what card that i could get to make this think work or a driver for my 3com 3c940 for longhorn or how to write my own