For the record, disabling Windows Update is a really, really bad idea.
Multiple critical-level vulnerabilities have been found and patched in every version of Windows.
You opt out from the update cycle, you become a target - your machine might get taken down by an otherwise obsolete exploit.
Don't count on firewalls and AV programs to save your butt when the OS hosting these utilities looks like a sieve.

Dynamic makes sure the miner stays in the background and should cause less frame rate loss; if you're willing to put up with lower resolution/settings while gaming by all means use any other intensity level.
675 looks about right, so do the temperatures.

Does the word "compromised" in the definition of what a botnet is ring a bell?

That's the contemporary meaning of the word. It has strong negative connotations.

While it is true that the word "bot" can mean any program from first-person-shooter games AI opponents to harmless IRC bots, these are not used in the context of botnets⁽¹⁾ and thus irrelevant to our discussion⁽²⁾.

Unless you want to try a valid argument for a change, I'm done here.

EDIT::a few links worth following:
http://www.honeynet.org/papers/bots/
http://www.abuse.ch/?p=3294
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/03/p2p-botnets-the-bigger-they-come-the-faster-they-fall.ars

Notes:
(1) you can safely assume your Counterstrike bots won't take over your gaming machine
(2) effectively outside of the scope

Since bots are installed covertly and without authorization they are inherently malicious.
Unauthorized access and/or change to a third-party's machine constitutes a felony in many jurisdictions.

It doesn't really matter what purposes the botnet as a whole might be used for.

A set of computers infected by malicious software giving a remote attacker control over them.
Typically used to send spam/fraudulent e-mails, steal login credentials and do whatever the criminal is able to monetize.
If the user is careless to install one, they are royally screwed.
Simple enough?

If you short the PWR_ON pin, that particular PSU will always be on - problem solved.

If you want to spend some cash, you can buy a dual PSU adapter.
Overkill really, especially if your miners are supposed to run 24/7/365.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet
So damned hard?

Care to look it up in the README?

PWR_ON pin (green cable, pin #16) needs to be grounded.
This should be trivial since both its neighbors (#15 and #17) are ground pins.

Temp-target is the temperature Cgminer will attempt to keep the card at. Fans will speed up and/or clocks will begin to decrease if the actual temperature rises above it.
If hysteresis is defined, fans will begin to speed up at 'temp-target minus hysteresis' °C.
Temp-overheat is the temperature threshold at which fans and clocks change significantly.
Temp-cutoff is the temperature threshold at which the card is taken offline completely. This is a protection against fan failure.
Hysteresis is an offset from those three temperature thresholds to take action at.

You'll want to set temp-target at the temperature your card will be mining at (the lowest temperature you can achieve with your current cooling setup at an acceptable noise level).
Temp-overheat should be a few degrees higher (say six). Temp-cutoff should be a couple degrees higher than overheat.

Experiment a bit, you'll get the hang of it.

Post your current temperatures and fan speeds if you're worried about the card.

What gpu-engine speed have you specified? What hash rate are you getting?
You can check the current clocks from inside cgminer, just press g for GPU management.

Latest stable is the newly released 2.3.2 version. It's been released just this morning.
Conman has put a lot off effort into optimizing the poclbm kernel for GCN so you might get even better results with
"kernel" : "poclbm",

I've seen some particularly bad core-memory clock combinations result in hardware errors and/or instability on a few of my cards.
Try some other memory clocks, doesn't have to be very far from you current setup, say 725/280 or 725/340.

As long as users are foolish enough to install software laden with trojans and run it with root privileges they will suffer the dire consequences.

Did you read this post in Bitcoin discussion?
The security-imbecile fell for some "optimized miner" mumbo-jumbo, installed this crap and when it -apparently- failed to work he instantly forgot about the whole matter!

Congrats bitcointalk3, you have proven there are fools aplenty.
If you really merely wanted to test your abilities have you perhaps set some TTL value (e.g. 30 days) after which the malware goes inactive?
That's the responsible thing to do, you know.

Umm... you're sure you're not using some ancient version of cgminer? It must be cgminer, that config won't work with Phoenix or any other miner.

As to the config file, I wrote this for you. It's guaranteed to work with latest cgminer.
cgminer.confAlso available on pastebin

Make sure to name the file cgminer.conf and drop it into cgminer's main directory - this way it'll be automagically looked up and loaded at each start.
This file if far more comphrehensive than the command line arguments used previously.
If you don't understand what an option does, look it up in the README

Only two lines need to be changed between the day- and night mode: intensity and gpu-threads

For day mining I suggest
"intensity" : "d",
"gpu-threads" : "1",

For night (full-throttle) mining:
"intensity" : "10",
"gpu-threads" : "2",

Windows Cgminer compilation can be downloaded from the author's website.

Day miner:


Night-mode mining:


worker_name, worker_pass, pool_address, and pool_port are pretty self-explanatory, right?
-k diablo selects DiabloD3 mining kernel which works well with GCN cards
-v 1 tells the kernel to use single-width vectors
-w 256 sets the work size to 256. Both this and vector width are fine-tuning parameters
-g 1 sets the number of mining threads per gpu to 1
-I d sets the intensity to dynamic; this should allow you to work without desktop lag
-I 10 sets the intensity to 10; this should boost the hash rate nicely at the cost of introducing significant lag
--gpu-engine 925 sets the GPU clocks to 925 MHz. You can easily overclock the card by specifying a higher value. If you're using the factory-overclocked version of 7970 DCII use 1000 here.

These are only a few of the available options, enough to get you going. Everything is very well documented in the README.

Mind you, there is a much better way of managing your cgminer configuration - you can create a single config file which will take care of all the settings.
In cgminer's window you need to press s (settings), then w (write config) to create a configuration file populated with the current config.
Alternatively, you could write if by hand, of course.

It isn't important what CPU you have, you won't be using it anyway.

Remove one card, see whether the problem goes away.
If it doesn't, try the other card. Be sure to test both PCIe slots.

Any case of unexpected CPU usage you're unable to track down should raise a red flag. Make sure no malware has crept into your machine.

Looking for this?

sed 's/mins/hours/'
The hashmeter has been tweaked, the measurements should be more stable but now, but it starts slow - please give it more time.

Good job, I'm glad to report zero performance loss on either VLIW-4 or VLIW-5 cards.

The bad news is, there's no noticeable gain either - I believe at this stage it would take no less than three 8-level wizards, an ancient grimoire, a bucket of cat blood and a slew of minor magical odds and ends to boost the hash rate.
At least git update 532179b24d made the code more elegant...