Network Traffic Causing High CPU Usage

Hello. For the last week or so, my network traffic has seemed to be related to some pretty sever spikes in my CPU usage. These spikes are causing extreme stuttering in my music playback, freezing of my cursor, and other symptoms of a really laggy computer. This pretty much occurs whenever I use the internet in any way. The worst spikes are when I'm loading webpages in Google Chrome and seeding on uTorrent, often freezing my cursor and music for several seconds at a time, though they're not limited to those two softwares. More recently, it seems that when I am loading pages in a browser, it's spiking CPU usage in bother the browser and even more so in the System process. It's becoming a real issue to use my computer. If anyone has any ideas on what I can do to troubleshoot this or solve this problem, I'd really appreciate it. Thank you!

On a side note, I've noticed that the displayed memory usage in the task manager (2.74 GB) is way more than what all the processes appear to add up to, usually by more than 1 GB. Any idea why this is?

I use AVG 9.0. I've tried disabling it with no change, but I'll try to uninstall it and get back to you.

I've uninstalled AVG, and the problem I had is gone. What do you think it was about AVG? Do you have any suggestions on how I can fix it, or which other antivirus software I should use instead?

logicearth said:

What antivirus, or security software (Firewall, etc) are you running?
Do the spikes continue if you uninstall all security software?

i use kaspersky,it is very great!

I dunno, I use AVG Internet Security 9.0 and have never experienced such an issue. If you are using a paid version, don't toss it out; do an uninstall then a reinstall.

If you were using the free version, I have read that Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is a wonderful, compact and low resource usage alternative.

Okay, thank's for all your help y'all. I'll try reinstalling AVG and messing around with the components to see if I can get rid of the issue that way. I appreciate the suggestions!