Getting system interrupts under control

[Ben Cole]

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad 10 which although it has issues, I do like.
I also like Windows 10 but it has big problems on the Thinkpad.

System interrupts usually hog 15-20% of CPU resources, which of course seriously hampers the use of the tablet.

From research it would seem this issue is usually caused by a rogue driver. So after failing to track it down I did a clean install using Lenovo's drivers. Things seemed great at first but it soon turned bad.

I then did the same with mostly just Windows update drivers but the same happened again.

Any tips before I try rolling back to Windows 8 or 7?

Thanks.

 

[jpaul]

Have you folllowed instructions in guides like this
using windows performance analysis toolkit - that nailed it for me to get an audio card running.

 

[Ben Cole]

Have you folllowed instructions in guides like this
using windows performance analysis toolkit - that nailed it for me to get an audio card running.

Thanks but that guide doesn't appear to work for W10. I did run windows assessment tool though and no problem was found with drivers?!?!?!?!?

 

[jpaul]

There is latencymon too which people are running on 10 but DPC latency checker should work too -
the wpa step is more complex - Performance toolkit has been upgraded for 10 and I did not yet try it and cannot see any guides - but should not be so dissimilar to predecessor.

Have not used windows assessment myself (that is what you meant - yes ?) , did it provides a test specific for the problem you have ?

(Another thing for tablet diagnosis maybe to get remote desktop running so that you can analyse via a regular pc with a big screen/keyboard etc - great for tablet maintenance imhop)

 

[Ben Cole]

The assessment tool runs a driver check. I don't really know what that does but it didn't come back with anything.

This thing has a qwerty keyboard and mousepad so its ok for self diagnosis.

Thanks for your input, its much appreciated. I think I'm just going to try Win 8 as I cant seem install Win 7.

 

[jpaul]

Yes, the driver check is not very extensive , and would not find unnecessary interrrupts

The Driver Verification assessment can be used to:

•Find device and driver issues without using Device Manager.
•Find missing device drivers in either a Windows image or a running operating system.
•Find driver issues before you deploy an image to a computer.
•Find software drivers that are not associated with any hardware devices.

curious - realised I had latencymon already installed , and in a couple of minutes gave a report
so if anything I might have audio/video driver issues

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
REPORTED ISRs
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Interrupt service routines are routines installed by the OS and device drivers that execute in response to a hardware interrupt signal.

Highest ISR routine execution time (µs): 103.389977
Driver with highest ISR routine execution time: HDAudBus.sys - High Definition Audio Bus Driver, Microsoft Corporation

Highest reported total ISR routine time (%): 0.015912
Driver with highest ISR total time: hal.dll - Hardware Abstraction Layer DLL, Microsoft Corporation

Total time spent in ISRs (%) 0.032255

 

[Ben Cole]

Think I've got this solved.

Just in case somebody does a search and ends up here. The answer for me was disabling Windows fast boot. The hibernation aspect of fast boot mode obviously played havoc with reloading drivers. Resume from hibernate would also result in crazy system interrupts.

This has done my head in for weeks and weeks. So happy to get it sorted, sleep efficiency seems to have improved too, from just under 2% drain per hour to 0.5% per hour.