My pc has been experience lag ever since it came back from a fan upgrade. Now i noticed that my cpu usage spikes from 10% to 80% and back in seconds, i see that svchost.exe is consuming 25% and system is spiking from 0% to 25% (i have 4 cores so it basicly consumes one core each). Does anybody has any idea of what to do?  Thanks in advance.  EDIT: I installed update KB3102810 and it partialy solved the problem,svchost does not spike anymore but System still spikes, meanwhile i noticed that in the services MsMpSvc, spikes up to 17%.
2299
I installed Windows 7 fresh and installed SP1. Now, when I try to check manually for Windows Updates it just hangs on the Checking for updates screen.    I tried running the tools in , but this did not fix the issue either:  No matter what I do it just hangs on the "Checking for updates..." screen and goes no further.
2855
When I start my PC, it boots into Windows (Windows 7 32-bit) quite happily, I login and the main Windows screen appears. At that point, however, the system is extremely unresponsive for up to 5 minutes - if I click on Firefox to start it, nothing appears to happen for a long time, etc, etc. The mouse and Windows UI is responsive, but programs take forever to start, webpages seem to hang (or at least load extremely slowly) and so on.  I imagine that the issue is with one or more programs that run on startup, but I don't know quite how to identify which one it might be. The event log shows nothing of any obvious interest. I can't see any high CPU activity in task manager or Process Explorer, and I can't hear any high disk activity.  I'd rather understand what's happening and then work out how to address it, than have to go for a blind "switch things off and see what helps" approach, but maybe that's being optimistic :-)  I suspect disk bottlenecks or network, but I don't know how I could set something up to diagnose this (and in particular, given that I can't get programs to start in a timely manner, I'd prefer something that automatically starts and logs data for later analysis than something like Process Explorer, which always leaves me worrying that by the time it started the problem had gone away :-)  I guess my ideal would be 2 things:   Something that gave me an overall "what are the current key bottlenecks in this system" summary (ideally, which could be set to run in the background and collect data for later analysis). Some means of starting a program (say, Firefox) and have it record what was going on in terms of waits and delays in the system.   Unfortunately, I've never really found anything like either of these.  I'm not a professional systems admin - my background is database admin - so if there are "obvious" tools to look at or try, then I'd be grateful to know of them (particularly if the information they give is easy for an amateur to analyze) :-)
9031
I have a fresh install of Windows 7, and my RAM in normal startup goes up to 2.5GB. I looked at Task Manager, and there's at least 1.5GB missing from there and in Resource Monitor as well. There's no indication of what's using that RAM. Can someone tell me how I can find out what's consuming my memory? I believe it's a virus, but none of the free antivirus programs tracked it down.   I added the pictures below. If this is normal usage of Windows 7 as some answers imply, then I don't get this at all.   P.S. My Windows 8 Installation was running below 2.5GB, actually it was 1. something, until recently that I transferred some files from another computer which had the same problem that mine has now. I deleted Windows 8 and installed Windows 7, since I would do that anyway, and now I'm getting high memory usage in Windows 7 as well.   (Click images to enlarge)
8656
I have noticed that from some time my system is freezing and its probably caused by the high CPU usage which is caused by the system process.  All applications I'm running is the Skype, TeamSpeak and Chrome so it definitely shouldnt eat that amount of CPU.  You can see the problem itself and running processes in the screenshot below:    Sometimes CPU usage is reaching 90%, but the average usage is like 40-65%.  My PC parameters:   Windows 8 (customer preview) Intel Core i3 - 2350M 8 GB RAM   I'd appreciate any help attempt! Regards.  --UPDATE--  As the user below posted a great answer, I have noticed that the process that is eating the most CPU in the system is called Arthurx.sys, simple google tells that it's a TPLink driver (an wifi adapter, I have bought like 2 weeks ago!) drivers has been installed from the Windows MSDN, but also tried to install the drivers from the attached CD, but it doesn't help. From the system start, it is using like 5% of the CPU only, but after 2-4 hours of working it is growing up and reaching 40-60% of the CPU usage.  Device name: TPLink WN722N
87784
Can anyone explain how Windows effectively limits the CPU?  Last time I tried some tricks to let my laptop not overheat, so I tried limiting the CPU to 70%.   As for my suprise it stopped my laptop from overheating - even when launching CPU intensive applications which caused my laptop to overheat and shut down, didn't overheat my laptop anymore!  I looked at task manager but the "CPU intensive" application still uses ~95% of CPU and the windows task manager shows a total of 100% CPU usage.  I have limited the CPU usage here ("plugged in" option was on 70% [both min and max] when testing the CPU intensive application):    How does Windows do this magic?   I see 100% CPU usage yet my CPU does not overheat. And I do not see any performance differences.  Does Windows limit the CPU speed? Like, if I have a 2.4 GHz processor, on 70% it will only have 1.68 GHz when limited? How is this possible (changing the CPU speed)? I thought you can only underclock when in BIOS?  If not, how does Windows accomplish this if not by changing the speed?    Side question: If it's about the speed, is there a way to set the CPU max state to 200% ?
82280
I've a windows 10 copy running in my core i5 second gen laptop. Now there is this issue where the hard disk usage goes to 100% and the system doesn't respond for a few seconds to even few minutes. I've run process monitor, resource monitor and found that the system uses the disk so much. This doesn't happen when the pc is on idle rather, if I open a folder or any other window, the hard disk usage spikes to 100% and be there for a long time! which is unusual.   I looked at the event log and there I saw a lot of events with the following message.  The start type of the Windows Modules Installer service was changed from demand start to auto start   I couldn't find what is wrong with the system. I use bitdefender 2015 antivirus and tried switching it off. Then again I disabled windows search, indexing service and all possible solutions I could find over the internet. Installed Ccleaner and did a registry clean and a system cleanup. Nothing worked and now the system is unusable! I cannot re - install windows since I don't have most of the software I've already installed.   If it helps the laptop is a Dell Inspiron n5110. Please help me..
17526
I think I'm being the victim of a bug here. Sometimes while I'm working (I still don't know why), my network traffic goes up to 200 KB/s and stays that way, even tough I'm not doing anything internet-related.   This sometimes happens to me with the CPU usage. When it does, I just run a top command to find out which process is responsible and then kill it. Problem is: I have no way of knowing which process is responsible for my high network usage. Both the resource monitor and the top command only tell me my total network usage, neither of them tells me process specific network info.  I've found questions here about monitoring total bandwidth usage, but, as I mentioned, that's not what I need. Is there another command I can use to find out which process is getting out of hand?  The command iftop gives results that disagree entirely with the information reported by System Monitor. While the latter claims there's high network traffic, the former claims there's barely 1 KB/s.  I've already tried killing all the obvious ones (Firefox, update-manager, Pidgin, etc) with no luck. So far, restarting the machine is the only way I found of getting rid of the issue.
98215
On my Toshiba Encore 8 Tablet I noticed that the CPU usage is very high. In Taskmgr / ProcessExplorer, I can see that OneDriveSetup.exe is hogging 1 CPU cores heavily for hours.    How an I solve this hang and finish the OneDrive Update?
76133
mds and mds_stores are constant CPU consumers even when I think nothing should have changed on the hard drive. Activity Monitor:  I have a circa 2009 Macbook Pro with lots of software installed over the years. Dropbox and Crashplan are active background processes among many others. I have included many locations in the privacy settings of Spotlight to exclude from its index:  USB drive Crashplan folder /Library/Caches /Users/me/Library/Caches  Still, mds and mds_stores are constant consumers of CPU hovering around 10-12% each. My fan keeps running due to the heat. Any ideas as to what it could be due and how I can troubleshoot?
8809
I recently upgraded to the Kubuntu Natty Beta 1 and I've been having a lot of issues with the process kworker. At moments it uses almost half my CPU. Also, strangely enough it seems to affect my USB ports; whenever I plug in an USB drive, the process kworker goes into hyperdrive, leaving me unable to work.  I have thought about filing a bug but since I haven't even found any reasonable explanation on what kworker is I figured I should find out first.
81679
whenever I move my mouse enough it causes high cpu usage. Screenshot provided is on a fresh X session.    This also causes some frequent freeze ups if I'm running some other programs e.g gaming.  [1075299.085] (II) event4  - Corsair Corsair Vengeance M90 Mouse: SYN_DROPPED event - some input events have been lost. [1077813.434] (II) event4  - Corsair Corsair Vengeance M90 Mouse: SYN_DROPPED event - some input events have been lost. [1077814.079] (II) event4  - Corsair Corsair Vengeance M90 Mouse: SYN_DROPPED event - some input events have been lost. [1077814.246] (II) event4  - Corsair Corsair Vengeance M90 Mouse: SYN_DROPPED event - some input events have been lost. [1077814.682] (II) event4  - Corsair Corsair Vengeance M90 Mouse: SYN_DROPPED event - some input events have been lost. [1077831.975] (EE) client bug: timer event4 debounce: offset negative (-18ms) [1077831.975] (II) event4  - Corsair Corsair Vengeance M90 Mouse: SYN_DROPPED event - some input events have been lost. [1077831.975] (II) event4  - Corsair Corsair Vengeance M90 Mouse: WARNING: log rate limit exceeded (5 msgs per 30000ms). Discarding future messages. [1120008.128] (II) event4  - Corsair Corsair Vengeance M90 Mouse: SYN_DROPPED event - some input events have been lost.   Is there any way for the CPU usage not to be this high?  EDIT:  I tried with other mice. The CPU usage appears to increase with the Mouse DPI or to be exact, a generic mouse will cause a CPU usage spike, but not as much as a gaming mouse.  I also checked if I have hardware acceleration enabled.  $ glxinfo | grep "direct rendering" direct rendering: Yes   EDIT 2:  CPU is an AMD FX-6350  GPU is AMD RX Vega 56
48030
I turned on my computer today and all of a sudden my power usage was spiking for everything. Not just in games but when i open task manager and watch videos...  I have never seen this happen on my computer before, and it only started today after turning on my computer.  My power supply is a EVGA 600B 80+   My amd integrated graphics is disabled and I am running a EVGA Geforce gtx 1060 superclocked.
9425
A few days ago I updated my PC to Windows 10. However, after some use my PC started to slow down until it was impossible to use – it was due to high memory usage. After a restart, everything came back to normal (total usage around 25% of 8GB of RAM). However, during a few hours of usage the memory builds up again to 70%, and if not restarted it further goes to 100%, and later on even freezes. Task manager does not help very much as it does not show all the processes (added screenshots below). Also tried RAMMap but it gives an error: "error refreshing database". I tried Googling this question, yet without much success.  I do not know much about PCs, but maybe some of you know this issue, or could help to find out what is using my RAM.
43947
I have a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS an a number of servers.  I have not added any cron jobs or edited my crontab on those servers, however, at around the same time for each machine, I get a 75% CPU spike and the following info in my syslog at the time of the spike:  CRON[8380]: (CRON) info (No MTA installed, discarding output)   I have mono-complete installed and am running a service stack webserver.  What is the best way for me to stop this from happening?  I would like to be able to remove the CPU spike.
47170
I have a laptop, which was running Windows 8.1 x64 without any problems. Now with Windows 10 x64 installed, Task Manager constantly shows unusual CPU usage by "System" and "System interrupts". To solve this, I already tried the following, without success:   Disabling and uninstalling all non-essential drivers. Installing newer drivers than the ones that were automagically installed (if available). Disabling/enabling fast boot option. Disabling all of the non-essential services. Sysprep. Resetting BIOS to defaults and various combinations of settings. Flashing BIOS to the latest available version. Clean install from the same media that I use for other PCs. Installing all of the updates offered in Windows Update to this day. Windows Performance Recorder / Analyzer.   I'm not very familiar with Windows Performance Analyzer, so I'm hoping someone here can point me in the right direction - what exactly should I look for, to figure out which device/driver is the culprit. Or, if there's any other approach to figuring out this problem?  For the brave souls, here's my  and a screenshot of the problem:
19985
My new laptop is two months old, the first day I got this laptop I noticed this but I assumed it was a bug in Windows 8. However I still have this issue today after reformatting and installing all updates.  The problem is that the disk shows 99% usage from an application...  In this case Dropbox, but the usage is never over 2 MB/s; in this case it is 0.8 MB/s.  What can I do about this?
35452
I thought that Windows 8 was supposed to be better with memory than Windows 7. So far, that is not my experience.  When I boot up my brand new laptop (Samsung NP550P5C-S03CA Intel Core i5 3210M 8GB 1TB ) , the Task Manager Performance tab tells me that I have:  8.0 Gb of DDR3 available  of this:  3.7GB is in use, leaving 4.2GB available  3.5/25.9 GB is committed and 1.4GB is cached.  162Mb paged pool, 2.4GB non-paged.  I then go to the Details tab, and I add up the Memory used by all the processes. It comes to about 300Mb. That is 0.3GB.  So what is using up the other 3.4GB of memory???  I then load up a bunch of programs that I use concurrently - notably Firefox (with about 30 tabs), Chrome, Thunderbird, Notepad++, Filezilla and my memory consumption goes up to 4.4GB. That seems about right.  I then work on it for a number of days, hibernating in-between, and I start to get notices that I am running low of memory. The performance tab says I am using 90% or more of my memory. The committed has gone up to 31GB. But if I add up the memory usage listed in the Details tab, it comes to only about 1800MB (I notice that Firefox has gone up to about 1300MB)  So, again, where has all my memory gone?  If I then close all the programs, it doesn't help. The details tab shows little running, yet the Performance tab shows I am still out of memory?  What is using up all my memory?  The only thing that clears it, is to do a restart. Which brings us back to the top of the loop, with the same initial question - what is using up over 4GB of my memory?  I never had these problems with windows 7.  As a sidenote, Win 8 also seems to be very unstable. Frequently getting programs not responding and crashing, including Windows Explorer, which seems to have to reload itself frequently.  Oh, and my wifi connection keeps dying and then I have to run the troubleshooter to get it all running again (my wife has that same problem on her brand new Acer).  So, what gives? How do I get my new laptop to work as fast as my 4 year old Sony Vaio with Win 7 and lower specs?  Anyone got any ideas? Or is this normal for windows 8?