I had a similar problem, and what stopped it was the stopping of all unnecessary process that run in Windows. My PC started at 50% spiking to 75%, after the change it's now about 7% with no spikes. This is on a Dual processor Pentium III 1GHz PC. A Dell 220 Precision workstation.
I believe the spike is caused by Windows processes running in the background that cause your cache to be flushed. Unfortunately you have to know a lot about windows to figure out how to optimize it, but there are sites that help you with the basic items. At 11:31 AM 2/5/2007, you wrote: >Thanks, Tim & Ken, for your replies. > >Yesterday I tried turning off the panadapter (and also >reducing the display's FPS), and, surprisingly, that >didn't seem to change the cyclical nature of the mips >consumption. (I'll have to experiement again this >evening and see if there's an overall change, though.) > >Please forgive my dumb questions, but how does one: > 1) turn off indexing > 2) ensure the cpu has some L2 cache > 3) create a large swapfile > >Thanks for your help! I'll try to report back this >evening with results... > >73, > >- Jeff, K6JCA > > >--- Ken N9VV <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Jeff, I can echo Tim's comments. The only thing that > > seems to help a > > Laptop at my location is: > > (a) a 7 FPS display rate > > (b) turning OFF the panadapter when I am on freq > > (c) turning off Indexing > > (d) sample rate at 48Khz (Audio/DSP Buffers = 2048) > > (e) making sure the Laptop CPU has some L2 cache. If > > you have a Centrino > > or Sempron or some "mobile" processor you won't be > > happy (no matter how > > high the Ghz are, you will still be hitting > > interrupts and context > > switching that will drive that % way up). > > (f) there are some free utilities out there that can > > help you force CPU > > speed to stay up (no good for power saving) but that > > is just a bandaid > > and not a good long term solution. > > Ken > > > > Tim Ellison wrote: > > > Check several things. > > > > > > Hard drive on laptops are notoriously slow and > > suck up a bunch of system > > > resources. Optimize hard drive access by: > > > > > > - Turning off file indexing > > > - creating a swap file large enough that windows > > doesn't resize it > > > - de-fragmenting the hard drive > > > > > > Also, most of the CPU taken by PowerSDR is in the > > running of the > > > Panadapter. > > > So you can: > > > - Update your video driver > > > - Change the FPS on the display to a bigger number > > > > > > Laptops also have a mode where they can dial down > > the CPU speed to save > > > battery life. Change your power management > > settings on the laptop to > > > full performance mode and do not shut down the > > hard drive after a > > > particular amount of time. > > > > > > -Tim > > > > > > >_______________________________________________ >FlexRadio mailing list >FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz >http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz >Archive Link: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ >FlexRadio Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/ > >FlexRadio Knowledge Base: http://kb.flex-radio.com/ Cecil Bayona KD5NWA www.qrpradio.com www.hpsdr.com 'Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with experience.' _______________________________________________ FlexRadio mailing list FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archive Link: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ FlexRadio Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/ FlexRadio Knowledge Base: http://kb.flex-radio.com/
