hey guys,

ive just received a brand new acer aspire 5670 and ive noticed a problem: even when no program is running (i.e. when the computer is idle) my cpu usage percentage jumps suddenly
from 1 or 2% to up to 40 percent...and then comes back to the 2%. this happens very fast but at regular intervals which causes the pc to freeze for a split second everytime the cpu reaches a peak ... i would really appreciate it if any of you can hep me solve my problem

Right click an empty area of the Taskbar (bottom of screen) and open the Task Manager.

Click on the Processes tab and see if you can detect which process is spiking the CPU.

thanx a lot !!! it really helped....turns out it was the ATIEVXX.EXE process .... i right clicked on it and clicked on end process tree ... however i have to do this everytime i reboot my computer ... what should i do?

atievxx.exe is installed alongside some ATI graphics hardware products and assists with graphics handling. This program is a non-essential system process, but should not be terminated unless suspected to be causing problems.

I have the same process running but it draws no CPU usage.

You can stop this (and any process) from starting using Autoruns:

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Autoruns.html

Is this a new problem? Have you recently changed Graphics Cards or the Drivers?