I'd really like to join in on this challenge, but I'm having trouble with BOINC again

this time its on my laptop so I know it has plenty of ram and its not slowing other processes down, but I still get a goofy cpu usage chart even though all the setting are set to use 100% of available resources
is this normal with the newer versions/WUs? the estimated time to finish is only 8hrs so it will still make deadlines with no problem... I guess I could just throw a folding client in the background with a slightly lower priority and forget about it, but it would be better IMO just to get WCG to run 100%
any ideas?