When downloading from rapidshare, I notice that this consumes all CPU available. This seems strange. Would the download start some background processes during the download?

cakes

Welcome to CDF's:

Do you have a download accelerator?

How about some internet speed info and your hardware specs.

As the Rapidshare website displays a lot of advertising before the download starts, it is quite possible that there are some flash/animated advertisements running that are hogging the CPU. I have seen this happen before, particularly on websites which have multiple animated banner ads.

The next time you download a file from Rapidshare and see the CPU usage max out, first try closing off the Radidshare window. If the CPU usage remains maxed out, try closing off remaining browser windows one by one until the CPU usage drops or until you are just left with the download dialogue box open. If the CPU usage still continues to be maxed out, have a look at the processes tab to see what process is hogging the CPU during the download. As far as I'm aware of, Rapidshare does not use any ActiveX plug-ins.

Thanks for your replies.

I have a P4 2.8mhz with hypertreading, 1GB RAM and a 3Mbit ADSL connection. No download accellerators. When I start the download (on a normal user account), the CPU goes up to the maximum, (which is 50% and not 100%, due to the hypertreading). CPU consumption remains like this, even if closing all other windows. The hungry process is iexplore.exe. Also the memory consumption of this process really sores, starting at 30MB but in the end reaching peaks of 100MB. Via the admin account I can see that the proces system (from system account) consumes about 30%.

During this, the filedownload window seems to freeze, and the download lasts longer than I would expect from the initial speed at which the download starts. When the download is finished, everything returns to normal.

I really think it is strange and cannot understand why a download would need that CPU. Unless rapidshare is doing something sneaky behind the scenes?

I don't think Rapidshare is responsible for it, and if it's Rapidshare.com I'm nearly sure they aren't.

Do you also have the problem when downloading from other sites?

Did you have Antivirus Software installed in the past?

You could also consider to try Firefox.