Had trouble running a game recently so I was looking at my processes and spotted one just called "System" which I don't think I've seen before. Virus and spyware scans came up with nothing.

It doesn't seem to use much CPU but it uses twice as much memory as explorer.

I tried googling it and came up with various threads to do with loose RAM or broken drivers and other things but nothing conclusive. Downloaded something called 'Process Explorer' and looked at 'Threads' and got the impression it might have something to do with 'ntkrnlpa.exe' but I have no idea what that is.

Can anyone help?

Hi, and welcome back to the PCHelpForum.

System is a process of windows, so its normal that its there.

ntkrnlpa.exe is a process associated with Microsoft® Windows® Operating System from Microsoft Corporation. You should not consider this a threat unless you get blue screens mentioning this name.

But in order to help you better, it might actually help to tell what the problem with a game was, instead of making an assumption and seeking help for that.

Sorry about that.

The game is Left4Dead which I've been playing with no problem for months now. It freezes several times a minute, sometimes for only a split second, sometimes for as much as 10 seconds. I thought it might be pausing to access the hard disk because of a lack of RAM, which is why I was suspicious of the 'System' process which was using the most memory, and when I turned the game textures right down it seemed to fix the problem, although it still happened a couple of times. It's also happened with Team Fortress 2, but not as often.

Even if this 'System' process isn't the cause of the problem I'm still suspicious of it. I looked at a couple of PCs at work and the same process only took up 300K or 80K of memory. Where as on mine its 67,000 K!

Ah bingo! (possibly)

I have another PC and found it had exactly the same "problem" so I thought it could be one of the programs I have on both. I did some googling and it looks like the problem may be caused by AVG Antivirus. I'll uninstall it at some point and see if that sorts it out.

Ok, I uninstalled AVG and it did reduce the system process down to 280K or what ever, but it hasn't made any difference to the game. So I surpose it wasn't that.

What could it be?

I've googled for what Left4Dead actually is, and seems like a fairly new game. Can you tell me the specifications of the 2 PC's you're playing the game on?

Also, are you playing in singleplayer mode, or multiplayer mode, as in, over internet?

To determine where this "lag" comes from, we need to see if its actually the system that has trouble to breath or that its the internet conenction thats holding everything up.

In this case, its far more likelly that internet is causing this, but that would only affect multiplayer.

I surpose this thread needs to be in the games section. I thought the problem was system wide but now I'm not sure if it's just something wrong with this one game.

The problem occors in both single and multi-player.

I'm only playing the game on one of my PCs which has 3Gb RAM, an Intel dual core 2.4Ghz processor, and a GeForce 9600 graphics card. Most importantly I've been playing the game for about six months now with no trouble, and I can't think of anything that's changed recently.