Solving my Windows 7 System Interrupts problem
Late last year I was given the option to install Windows 7 on my work laptop. Being a bit of an old laptop I was weary, though the buzz was that Win7 was great and performed well even on lower end hardware. I went ahead and installed it.
This isn’t a Win7 review article though, it really is a good OS blah blah. The biggest problem I ran into is that a good 40/50% of my CPU was constantly being used for “System Interrupts”. Even though it still seemed to perform really well considering the available hardware, it was a rather annoying situation to be in. I did the usual:
- Disable non-essential hardware
- Update all drivers
- Update OS
- Google like crazy
- etc.
Though nothing helped and there wasn’t really any good information out there.
Flash forward through the Christmas holidays and getting in to the office this morning 2 things in my brain crossed paths:
- The laptop’s battery is horrible and Windows 7 initially alerted that no battery was detected.
- I was still wasting a huge amount of CPU cycles on interrupts for no apparent reason.
As I thought of these things at the same time I knew it had to be the problem. Without even turning off the laptop I opened up the performance monitor, swung the laptop onto it’s side and whipped the battery out. System Interrupts instantly dropped from a CPU AVG. of 40/50% to <1%.
I gained a huge amount of available cycles whilst losing about 30 seconds of battery life, seems like a pretty good trade.
If anyone’s interested because of a similar issue the laptop is an Acer TravelMate 4220.
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