For the last month or so, I have been noticing a bunch of CPU spikes on my netbook, which is really low-powered for a CPU anyway. So, I got the latest version of Process Explorer, did a little web searching, and had come to no solution until today when I found this blog post by one of the creators of Process Explorer, Mark Russinovich who was experiencing the same issue. So I am clearly not as smart as he is, but I read his post and since he mentioned a Broadcom network driver that ended up being his culprit, I figured I would investigate my drivers.

Sure enough, my wireless network board built into the Acer Netbook (previously blogged) has a Broadcom driver. I didn't go to the extent he did about poking around and such, I just went to the Acer website to look for the driver to see if there was an update. Turns out I had the latest version. So, just for grins I went to the control panel and uninstalled the driver for that device. It had me reboot, and since I didn't delete the software itself, the driver reinstalled automatically on boot. Once I got the network reconfigured and back on WiFi, everything has been running smoothly with no more CPU spiking.

Good to know how he tracked down the issue, however, since it may occur again in the future. Let this be known: Broadcom driver users - beware of CPU spikes...