My introduction… and problem :-)

[BigVall]

Howdy ppl,

Representing Wellington NZ here 😎

I’ve just installed Win2008 Enterprise 64 on my laptop and desktop and loving it! This site was absolute gold when it came to setting it up… I actually stumbled upon it by accident but after reading a few pages I knew it was for me. I’m a web developer so having Win2008 as my OS is brilliant…

Right, so my problem… dwm.exe is an absolute CPU hog when I do anything. Wether it’s opening new programs, scrolling in a browser, basically doing anything and it’ll shoot up to *at least* 50%-60% cpu (inside Task Manager) which then in turn gives me stuttery sounds (yes, I imported that registry entry) and sluggish performance, in what ever program I’m in, for a couple of seconds. I thought I could deal with it but it’s getting tiresome when all I have to do it open a new tab in Firefox or scroll down a source file in Visual Studio.

I know what the process does, done enough research, and I could disable aero to fix it but I quite like aero and to be frank, it really shouldn’t be causing problems because my specs are nothing to sneeze at – my computer should chew 08 up and spit it out! And I was previously running Vista Ultimate 64 with aero and had no problems what so ever!

Basic Specs:
E8400 (Core 2 Duo @ 3GHz)
8GB DDR2 800
Gigabyte 8800 GTS 512 MB

I’m also having problems playing back media… hmmm, it could be related but dwm.exe isn’t such a problem then. What codec packs do ppl recommend? I installed the K-lite 64 bit pack…

I think I’m going to uninstall my video drivers and install them again, I’ve basically tried everything else. I’m at wits end, please help!!!

Thanks in advance,
Charles

Ps. Did you guys see that SQL Server 2008 was RTM’d today? Just downloading it now… mmmm spatial data.

[DougC]

Charles,

I have a very similar E8400 setup at home except I have an 8600GT video card and 4G of RAM. My Server 2008 Enterprise 32 installation runs beautifully with all the Aero effects enabled and I do not see high CPU usage on dwm.exe. Since dwm.exe is responsible for the 3D and transparency effects, I wonder if your video card drivers are causing problems? You might want to try either newer or older versions to see if it improves the situation.

I presume you have activated the Desktop Experience feature?

Doug

[BigVall]

Hi Doug,

Thanks for your reply, I’ll give that a go… might be an issue with the nVidia 64 drivers. I am using the latest drivers so I might give an older set a go. Uninstalling and reinstalling the same drivers last night did no good.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Cheers,
Charles

Ps. Yeah, installed all that jazz… basically followed all the instructions from this site word for word.

[Author]

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