Notebook gaming: How can I lower CPU usage?

Games, even very old games, can be very CPU heavy. Your CPU only has one core to run everything, is an ultra low voltage model and is running at a pretty low clock speed on so I’m not surprised it’s running flat out. Having said that if it’s running the games you want with out any problems I really wouldn’t worry about it. CPU’s can happily run at 100% so long as they are cool sufficiently and that model is designed not to produce much heat anyway. As long as you’re having regular breaks where you stop gaming you should be fine.

@Lightlyseared Thanks for the answer, appreciated.

There is nothing wrong with the CPU at 100%. All that shows is that the CPU is utilizing is full potential. Even though programs don’t need that much CPU power to run, some will happily use any extra power they can. Any program that tries to prefect or speed up its operation, such as simulations that try to run as fast as possible and game AI’s that try to think as hard as possible, will usually use up as much CPU power as allowed.

Oh okay, I had no idea. I thought CPU at 100% meant the computer would soon explode.

The CPU at 100% generates heat and drains batteries, but won’t cause any damage… as long as your heat sinks are not clogged with lint and you don’t block the air vents.

Baldur’s gate 1 and 2 were games designed with an incredible level of scalability in mind, to fit any kind of configuration, including configurations that didn’t exist/were not very common back then.

It’s highly likely you could actually cut off percentage points by scaling down some processor heavy settings, like pathfinding nodes and such, in the game’s configuration tool.

Also remember that games back then didn’t rely as much on graphics cards as they do now, so most of the work fell on the processor, like with flash games and videos today.