Excessive CPU usage by svchost.exe

I have noticed one machine in our office has always had excessive fan noise, and when I looked into it further I found that one of the svchost.exe processes listed in Task Manager runs with at least 13% CPU usage at all times, constantly. Sometimes it's much higher. The CPU never gets down to an "idle" state with 98-99% resources available, like my machine and every other one I've seen does.

I checked the processes in use by that particular instance of svchost, and found the ones in the attached screen shot. I also ran a check with an updated Malwarebytes and it found nothing.

Any ideas? Is there anything on that list of services that should be disabled?

Print out that list then go to a machine with a lower usage.

Can you see items on this high use computer that don't appear in the others? If so, that might be a clue as to what services need to go from automatic to manual.

PatrickGSR94,
It is kind of hard to see the highlights in that screenshot. Not that you need to make another screenshot, but in the future, temporarily changing to the classic theme makes the highlights much darker. Also, if you sort that list of services by Process ID (PID), then all of those "420s" would be grouped together - which makes for a smaller screenshot

It is most likely the wuauserv. Temporarily stop that service and see if the CPU usage drops.

If that does "solve" the CPU usage, then I would suggest doing the steps in option 3 of this tutorial: Windows Update - Reset

Then make sure that this KB is installed: KB3135445

UsernameIssues said:

PatrickGSR94,
It is kind of hard to see the highlights in that screenshot. Not that you need to make another screenshot, but in the future, temporarily changing to the classic theme makes the highlights much darker. Also, if you sort that list of services by Process ID (PID), then all of those "420s" would be grouped together - which makes for a smaller screenshot

It is most likely the wuauserv. Temporarily stop that service and see if the CPU usage drops.

If that does "solve" the CPU usage, then I would suggest doing the steps in option 3 of this tutorial: Windows Update - Reset

Then make sure that this KB is installed: KB3135445

I wonder if that's the update that installed Thursday as I was leaving that afternoon. Friday morning I came in and booted up the machine, it finished installing updates, and now the machine no longer has the CPU usage problem that it's had for years leading up the creation of this thread last week.

Start > search for View installed updates.

If need be, select the Details view.

If need be, sort by the column named Installed On.

Check each section to see what was installed and when.

You can also search for that KB from that window.