Lord Peter Mandelson, Uk Ambassador
News1 min ago
Cpu Running At 100% Most Of The Time How Do I Find What Is Running?
Hi my cpu is running at almost 100% most of the time so pages on the internet are quite slow to download even though I have about 10 MBIT speed how do I find what is using this processing power?
TIA
TIA
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As soon as you start your computer, open Task Manager (via right-clicking on the taskbar at the foot of your screen). Select the 'Processes' tab. Click on 'Show processes from all users' (granting permission if you're asked for it) and then minimise the window down to the task bar. (You need to open Task Manager early on, as it's almost impossible once something has grabbed all of your system's resources).
Once things start to slow up, bring up Task Manager again and look down the CPU column to find the culprit. However it might not be as simple as that as it often turns out to be svchost.exe which has a massively high figure and that only tells you that something is trying to download data but fails to tell you exactly what it is.
So (assuming you've identified svchost.exe as the problem) the next thing to do is to look down the 'MemUsage' [or 'Memory(Private Working Set)] column for a figure which keeps changing every second or so. [NB: The actual figure might not be very high; it's the constant changing that you're looking for].
If you can find such a constantly changing memory figure, you'll almost certainly have identified the root cause of the problem.
However I can probably tell you now what it is anyway (because it's what causes well over 95% of such problems): It's highly likely that it's the part of your security software which seeks to update it. (So if you're using Microsoft Security Essentials it will be MsMpEng.exe. If you're using Avast it will be AvastSvc.exe, and so on).
If I've got that right, the solution is to uninstall your security software and then to reinstall it (or, possibly better, to install something else).
Once things start to slow up, bring up Task Manager again and look down the CPU column to find the culprit. However it might not be as simple as that as it often turns out to be svchost.exe which has a massively high figure and that only tells you that something is trying to download data but fails to tell you exactly what it is.
So (assuming you've identified svchost.exe as the problem) the next thing to do is to look down the 'MemUsage' [or 'Memory(Private Working Set)] column for a figure which keeps changing every second or so. [NB: The actual figure might not be very high; it's the constant changing that you're looking for].
If you can find such a constantly changing memory figure, you'll almost certainly have identified the root cause of the problem.
However I can probably tell you now what it is anyway (because it's what causes well over 95% of such problems): It's highly likely that it's the part of your security software which seeks to update it. (So if you're using Microsoft Security Essentials it will be MsMpEng.exe. If you're using Avast it will be AvastSvc.exe, and so on).
If I've got that right, the solution is to uninstall your security software and then to reinstall it (or, possibly better, to install something else).
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