Task Manager weirdness
 

So I left my taskmanager running when I went to work this morning, and when I got home my PC was asleep (monitors off etc...). However when I woke it up the taskmanager showed this:

<img src="http://telusplanet.net/public/markus_e/images/taskmgr.JPG">

Doesn't that seem kinda odd? Why would there be regular peaks if the system was idle (there was 0 network activity BTW). I very much doubt this is a spyware deal, it's probably a normal windows thing... can any one explain it?

I'd say that you probably have some process in the background running while the pc is idle. It's hard to tell without knowing what processes are running/what software you have installed on the pc.

Generally, it could be something like background defragging, MS indexing service, virus scanner or something.

Could be a screensaver going on?

i was at my friends work one day and was looking at the system stats off the server.. one comp awas running at full load for some reason.. no one was on it.. so we walked over.. and all that was on was the screen saver..

not really sure if its a "windows thing" for i left it up for about an hour befor looking at this and the only spike in usage was at the start when i loaded the task manager. The rest of the time it was jumping between 0 and 2% useage. Thats with microsofts antispy beta and avg running.

here's the BEST thing to do when diagnosing that issue. i gaurantee first off, as everyone above says, it's your processes thinking on its own. do the following:

start > run > type "msconfig" > click on "startup" tab > click "disable all" button > click "apply" > click "ok" > restart computer > leave computer idle for the night and check task manager again > after diagnosing and confirming the issue, reenable startup settings in microsoft configurations aka msconfig.