ACPI.sys' thread idles at 25% CPU usage

[Allan]

No, this error can be caused by a weak battery. I'm not saying that's the cause, but it's a possibility. Removing it will make things worse. Please get a new one when you can and see if that helps. After you get the new battery, if the problem persists try resetting the bios to default again.

[Veltas]

I found a battery lying around and replaced it with that, and I also removed the new stick of RAM I bought not too long ago (I spotted a thread that suggested that fix the issue temporarily).

Apart from going back to good ol' 2001 and halving my RAM, I haven't done much in my favor, the issue still occurs.  I'm going to put my old battery and RAM back in for now, I'll try out a new battery another day.

Thanks for all the help anyway, is there anything else I can try in the meantime?

[Allan]

Nothing I can think of. Sorry.

There are a bunch of folks a lot better with hardware issues than I am. Let's hope one of them has a thought.

[Salmon Trout]

A quick Google for example "ACPI.sys high cpu" shows dozens of hits. ACPI.sys is crucial to the OS interface with the hardware and there are many things that can lead to this problem. Wake on Lan, interrupts, PCI devices, USB devices, just about anthing on the motherboard or connected to it. Not to mention corrupted Windows files.

[Veltas]

A quick Google for example "ACPI.sys high cpu" shows dozens of hits. ACPI.sys is crucial to the OS interface with the hardware and there are many things that can lead to this problem. Wake on Lan, interrupts, PCI devices, USB devices, just about anthing on the motherboard or connected to it. Not to mention corrupted Windows files.

Unfortunately, I've already googled for this and seen this.  I don't think it's a wake on lan thing (I followed their instructions to fix it to no avail).  It's not the interrupts sub-process on Process Explorer that's taking up CPU, and if it is interrupts I certainly don't know how to fix it.  All my devices are working on the latest drivers (to my knowledge).  There are no oddities in my Device Manager as far as I can tell.  I tried a system integrity check which decided that my system files were okay.

It seems that each result leads to a different solution, so may well all be different issues; perhaps different to mine.  I've tried following their solutions but it's not worked for the ones I found.

[Veltas]

If this is a hardware issue, it could be my motherboard, my hard drive, my processor, my graphics card or my power pack; because I've tested everything else and these are all system critical.

I don't know much about hardware, so I have no idea what out of that list could cause that problem.  If anyone knows a possible cause or any way I could troubleshoot for more info on the problem then please tell me.

All I know is that this problem could end up being very expensive to fix.

[patio]

You already ran MemTest ? ?

[Veltas]

I ran MemTest and also tried swapping my RAM for other RAM.  No RAM change fixed the issue.

[Veltas]

BEHOLD, I installed Win7 again onto another partition and the clean install resolved the issue.  So I suppose I'm right in assuming this means that the issue is definately software related (thank God) and I just need to track down the rogue driver or update that's caused the issue.

Thanks for all the help guys, when I figure it out and get everything back to normal I'll post details and mark as solved.

EDIT:
On second thoughts, the issue wasn't resolved when I tried Safe Mode (on the old OS, obviously Safe Mode works on the new install) so barring the possibility that system files are corrupted, the only other possibility is that an update has bugged one of the core system files.

[Veltas]

After slowly installing all my old drivers and updates, I can't find a single one that causes the issue to reoccur.  After uninstalling and reinstalling all these drivers on the old installation, I can't get the problem to stop.

I'm going to put the issue down to corrupt system files FNAR and leave it at that, I don't know what the problem was but a fresh install seems to be the fix, and I wish I'd tried it earlier.

[Veltas]

Ahhhhhh...... that's better.

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