Gertrude, I'll call you on that. Open Task Manager, look at the CPU usage and tell me honestly that it's below 1% on your system.
Yup. Mosly says 0, occasionally 1. This typing isn't bringing it up any higher.
Open windows: task manager; Windows explorer; this browser window; Visual Studio 2005 and its help system; control panel Services applet; a custom and rather nasty piece of Java. Machine: not too ancient desktop, designed for building software not playing games, 3.4GHz, 2G RAM. But I get the same sub-1% behaviour on all my other machines, including vastly slower ones than this.
Look, I got paid lots of money to spend most of last week finding out why one particular application, which was doing a lot of polling, was eating 10% CPU whilst idle, as that was clearly completely unacceptable. I got it down to below 1%, even up after making it run six times faster, ie I improved its performance by a factor of 60.
Maybe you've got some simlarly badly engineered applications running?
Whatever, if you think 10% idle CPU is normal you're used to some very odd behaviour.