Busy CPU Meters
 

The same situation has affected two laptops, an Acer notebook and a Dell Inspiron, both running windows 7 and usually using IE.

For weeks, the cpu meters would periodically show activity when no programs (applications) were open, and if unchecked would considerably fill the capacity of the CPU memory. Most often this was solved with a reboot.

Then the situation became more persistent and reboots did not help, nor did a series of three system restores, kicking it back to May. The smaller Acer was more severely affected because the memory filled quickly and it slowed to the point of being almost frozen.

Malware bytes run on both computers found NO problems. Updated and run again and still nothing.

Yesterday the Acer was reset to factory settings and the problem persisted.

Has anyone encountered this and located the process or service responsible?

Are they Windows (either Visa or 7)?

Try disabling Windows updates, there is a known problem with the windows update service particularly on 7 that sends the cpu usage up to 100%, can slow a single core PC to a complete halt. Fix is available from Microsoft but doesn't always work!

Both are windows 7, and automatic updates have been disabled on both, partly because of a friend who had 10 loaded behind his back.

Do you know how to view 'processes' in the task manager? Click on the top of the cpu column to list them by %age use of the cpu. That will tell you what is hogging cpu. You could do the same for memory to find out what's using most.

Thank you for that good suggestion.

The clear winner is something called iexplorer.exe which is hogging most of the space in both cpu and memory. Will research same.

fin, give me a call soon and I'll work through what I learned with you.

Oh, you have run Ccleaner, haven't you? :p

Will call soon. Have not run ccleaner, and in a related thread re windows 10, there seems to be some indication that it is not always a good idea.

What I DID do was to click on that "never ten" option, and while it will take awhile to be sure, I think -- I HOPE -- that the situation has been largely corrected.