CPU usage varies (minor spikes )

[rachit2588]

Yesterday all was kewl until i installed Civilization5 , now the cpu usage which ideally was 0% on my corei5 (in idle state) now varies instantaneously between 1 to 8% even when nothing is running.

Some task is causing minor spikes but i dont know what ?
i even reinstalled all the video, audio , lan drivers still facing the same problm...did system restore but still that spikes.....

one thing i have carefully observed a verry veery very faint hmmming sound is produced "periodically" which was not observed before i got this problm!!:sarc:

 

[unifex]

Well, what you can do is to use the Task Scheduler to determine if the new game has introduced any new Tasks that are active and running. Services panel will tell you if any new services were introduced. Msconfig will list all the start-up items, perhaps your game has added something there as well. If none of these uncover your culprit, then you can read the logs (in Event Viewer) to see what's going on.

If none of the above helps you, you could uninstall the game, or better yet, Restore the system to a previously working state by using a Restore Point prior to the game installation. After this you could try installing the game in a VM or in a Sandbox to see what does it actually do to your system. But this seems rather drastic to me. I suspect that there might be some extra service or scheduled task lingering.

Of course, I assume that your game comes from a legit source and is thus free of any malware. Still a virus scan and a scan with Malwarebytes will make you sure that your system is free of any infection.

Humming sounds can come from fans that rev at higher speeds with higher CPU usage. They may also come from your hard drives if there is a lot of read/write activity. Basically, there are no other moving parts in your system, and usually I associate humming sounds with moving parts. If restoring the system to a previously good state does not eliminate the sounds, then it might be that there is some separate hardware issue and the fact that it appeared when you installed the game is just a coincidence. However, this is rather unlikely (not impossible though), so for now I would assume that uninstalling the game should get rid of the noise as well.

 

[rachit2588]

one more thing to be noted, i have created a new admin account and there i find all things to work as usual the task man. shows 0% usage (idle ) in the new account....so something is wrong with my current account task threads..now what should i do..??

 

[unifex]

It seems to me that your game and possibly additional services/tasks/programs that came with it were installed for your particular user account rather than for All Users. Therefore, if you log on as another user, then these processes do not start and hence no CPU usage. So to me this confirms that if you want to simply get rid of that extra stuff you just need to uninstall the game and everything that came with it. If, on the other hand, you want to play the game, then you just need to determine what was installed along with it and runs even when you're not playing. Then you can find out how critical this stuff is to your game and at least set them not to run at start-up. This way you won't have this extra stuff running when you're not playing the game.