Windows 7: excessive cpu usage

I don't change a thing with my services, plus I have MalwareBytes Antimalware and Avast! running 24/7, I have stuff for my iPaq, stuff for my DL manager, and quite a few other things that load on startup - and I don't get CPU spikes like that unless I am doing something. and at idle I have between 1-3% utilization.



Now, just b/c you're not doing something *actively* doesn't mean something is not going on in the background - if you have any Fx add-ons that synchronize to a website (like Weave, Read it later, etc) then you 8are* doing something. Also, if nothing on your system is showing any CPU utilization, and yet you say it has an 80% utilization, then you're either not reading the results correctly, or something is lying.

You can't have both 80% usage and 80% idle. It is not physically possible.

So, again, what *exactly* are you running, and please post screen captures so *we* can analyze it - you are our eyes and ears on this one, but we're not getting enough info from you so we need more.

*also* if this only occurs when the system resumes from sleep or hubernation, that is an ***important*** fact. if it occurs at *exactly* the same time after a reboot, that is an important face - we need to know these things in order to be able to trouble shoot your system.

It's the equivalent of saying "My car won't start."

Do you have gas?
Is the water pump obstructed?
does it have oil?
Is the carb / injector getting air?
Does the batter have power?
Is the starter / solenoid in working order?
Is the car in Park or Neutral?

That is just a *basic* list.....

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Try using a different process viewer, such as Anvir Task Manager or Microsoft's Process Monitor (Sysinternals). These will provide much greater detail about what processes are running and how much CPU they are using. I've occasionally noticed similar behavior where the CPU desktop gadget shows a high reading while the Windows task manager shows no process activity. The answer to that is the Windows task manager is not showing all processes.

dont know if its related but i had a similar problem while running avast the problem was avast antivirus (after an update) went a bit nuts i think what it was i interuptted it when it was updating and didnt install the update properly cpu usage a few minutes after boot would rocket to 100% and stay there,i could'nt do a thing in the end i disabled all the resident scanners and cpu would return to normal i then started up avast and updated it through the main program rebooted and everything was fine,apart from it disliked utorrent 1.82 so i installed 1.77 instead.

Now that you bring this up, I had almost the same thing happen with AVG antivirus (The Resident Shield was using 100% of the CPU) I disabled it. Everything has been ok since.

McBlzr, with regards to the AVG CPU usage did you by any chance install the linkscanner? I was having CPU usage issues and it was down to this as well as another issue I've just resolved.

Could it be firefox? I haven't been too impressed with Firefox in sometime. Guess I could give IE 8 a try. No AV running since I told Norton to go away after setting up the pc. Note the processes tab is sorted by CPU usage not Memory.

Thats unusual. I can't really tell anything by those screenshots, since it isn't really showing what is using that much of your CPU. Try opening up the resource monitor and see if it's a service that is doing it. I doubt it's firefox. if It was firefox it would show up on your task list and show that it is using a high percentage of your CPU cycles.

As the prophet said a screenshot of the cpu tab from resource manager might shed some light. Make sure you sort it by the cpu labelled column so we can see the highest cpu item listed.

I used the process monitor from sysinternals but it lists way too much stuff to be very useful and I don't seem to be able to sort by anything or see a cpu column. If there's a good guide out there or you have any tips on using that tool, please share (I've never used the sysinternals tools before).

Using Resource monitor (the built in one, never seen/used it before) seems to indicate that "System Interupts" has 70% or so of my cpu cycles but that doesn't seem very helpful (as far as I can tell).

*UPDATE* I used systinternals' process explorer and Deferred Procedure Calls seems to be what is pegged at 60% but there doesn't seem to be more information available (right clicked on it and looked through the properties window).

hmm your system interrupts are somewhat high, mines usually around 1 or 2.

This IRQ level is usually a symptom of some hardware fault OR a bad
driver so you could try removing some hardware to see if it goes away.

You could try find IRQ monitoring software.

Try booting into safe mode and see if the problem goes away (that could be a sign of bad drivers). If it does go away try disabling various hardware in the device manager.

If it does not go away try move your ram sticks around or reduce them to 1 to test if you have more than one stick.