Mac Forum / General / Portable Macs / July 2006

I recently noticed that on my wife's iBook (G3 700 MHz, 640 MB, Panther
10.3.9) the Finder always uses every CPU cycle so that the CPU load is
always 100%. about 80% of that is in kernel (system) mode (i.e. red on
Activity Monitor). This is when no other application is running.

It did not used to do that, and my G4 PowerBook (10.3.6) does not
either, i.e. CPU should be at least 80% idle when no app is running. I
rebooted the machine, no change. Besides this everything appears to work
and I do not see any stray apps or so running, nor do I have network or
disk activity (I even disconnected the network & turned Airport off). I
do not know when this crept in, but we haven't done any upgrade since
10.3.9.

It is a battery lifetime issue (the busy processor will drain more
current) and also the machine is likely more sluggish than it needs to
be (I don't have good comparison, though).

Has anybody else seen this & maybe found a fix?

Mac Dude