Task Manager High CPU Usage

My laptop used to have a moderately high performance with i7-4712HQ, 16GB RAM, Samsung Evo750 1TB SSD, GTX850M.

Now I suffer from serious system delay for a period. One symptom I noticed is having slow speed opening file explorer (would need to wait for like 3 seconds after clicking on the icon). Another major symptom is stated as the subject.

Sometimes, when I experience a slow performance and I want to check what’s using up my hardware resources, the task manager would often take more than 5 seconds to display anything, and not responding periodically. Sometimes it shows my cpu usage to be 100%, where the first three apps (sorted by cpu usage) cost no more than 15% and others are all below 10% (I doubt they will add up to 100%). My system will be super laggy with the cursor respond to the mouse with 1 sec delay, not moving smoothly. I wonder if there’s anything wrong with the system, or just my laptop is out of its life? Although I’ve only used it for 3 years.

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The specifications of your device are higher end.

Can help to disable all programs running simultaneously with Windows in the Task Manager by clicking the Startup tab found there but I suspect you may have already done this.

The history of your device might be responsible for it’s slower performance. Was it upgraded to Windows 10 from 7, 8, or 8.1?

What version and OS build are you running?

There’s nothing like performing a Clean Installation of Windows 10 and reformatting the SSD anew to revive performance.

If you need to preserve your files you can perform the Custom Installation of Windows 10 This will save them to a Windows.old folder.

There is also a Reset option and a Start Fresh option within Windows 10 for starting over.

Have you run a CHKDSK /F on your SSD?

Those are some thoughts.

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I have the same issue. I noticed if I click the task manager it take quite awhile to open up. If I sort by Name, it hangs for 10 seconds are so. Sorting by other columns is faster but it still hangs.

When this happens, the mouse lags too. I have unplugged all external devices except for the mouse and keyboard, and the CDROM and it still happens.

Virus scan does not find anything.

I suspect it might be related to the Windows 10 Creators edition update that recently happened.

I have a 6-Core Xeon E5-2620 with 40GB of RAM and SSDs for primary hard drives.

Needless to say, this is drive me nuts.

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I have this exact same issue, as Charles mentioned the mouse lags and hangs for a couple of settings when sorting by names.

Sometimes it decides to hang for that exact time just by opening task manager without sorting, I’ve not found a common cause to the issue but it seems to happen a lot when I have memory hungry applications open.

It does indeed drive me nuts also.

I’m running windows on an SSD and have a 6700k and I’m also loaded with 16gigs of DDR4 so this can’t be a hardware issue I wouldn’t think,

I don’t know how more people aren’t experiencing this, I guess a lot of people don’t use task manager enough to notice.

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The Windows Creator update created other issues for me too. I use Dragon NatuallySpeaking and after the update it would not work. I tracked down the issue to my anti-virus software Webroot.

I made modifications based upon this article and it corrected the Dragon issue and somewhat improved the above reported issue but, it did not correct the issue completely. I am careful not to have task manager and a web browser open at the same time.

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Your reply is absurd (sorry).

I have an Alienware i7 new laptop with Windows 10 Pro.

It suffers from the problem — when the task manager is started, NOTHING works for minutes. Almost completely unresponsive!

The mouse cursor doesn’t barely moves. I have to find the cursor using cursor sonar, then make a swipe movement toward the window exit control wait for it to move (30-60 seconds each time), finally getting the cursor positioned on the X and THEN press the left mouse button and wait for taskmgr to exit.

Have to close the taskmgr to make it stop.

I have another i7 laptop a Qosmio from Toshiba that has the exact sample problem as several other machines running Windows 10 Pro. All have this problem. All BUT the Alienware is a upgrade to Window 10 Pro. In the upgrade case, the problem only surfaced around Oct to Nov not immediately after the upgrades.

The problem seems likely to some update to Windows 10 Pro subsequent to its initial release.

Microsoft needs to do a better job replicating this problem and fixing it.

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Performance issues in Windows devices are usually occurring due to software conflicts. For us to provide an effective solution, we would need you to answer the following questions:

• Which build of Windows 10 Pro is installed on the devices that are affected by this issue?
• Are you experiencing the same issue even when the devices are on clean boot mode?
• What changes have you made to the device before the issue occurred?
• Is the issue happening to all of the user profiles in the devices?

In the meantime, it will be best to make sure that your Windows is up to date. Let us know if the same issue persists after installing Windows Update.

We are looking forward to your response.

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I could replicate this issue systematically in clean boot mode on two Win10 Pro 1709 machines (one assembled PC, one Asus Transformer Pro): after clean boot, launch TM in detailed processes view, then fire up several browsers and watch Windows take the dive.

Win10 Home, on a third machine, was less affected by this problem. But here too, there are many performance issues, with many third-party software I must use. And the only real solution I found was to revert to Win 8.1.

Strangely enough, I could not replicate the issue on a Microsoft Surface. I didn’t try hard, though.

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We appreciate your cooperation in resolving this concern. We are still looking forward to the response of other community members in this thread, for us to verify if reverting to Windows 8.1 will also address the issue on their devices.

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winver gives: 1709 OS Build 16299.192 — this is a new Alienware machine not three months old.

I have changed no hardware.

It happens with both the admin or a normal user login.

BTW: I do NOT have a microsoft account associated with these users (not that it SHOULD matter).

This suggestion is silly:

In the meantime, it will be best to make sure that your Windows is up to date. Let us know if the same issue persists after installing Windows Update.

How is it possible to NOT have Window 10 be updated over any length of time?

When it first obtained the machine, this problem with the taskmgr freezing the system did NOT happen. I suspect IS to some Window 10 enforced updated.

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Your PC performance might have been slowed down due to a possible hardware issues or a corrupted system file. As suggested previously by Darleen Pen last February 11, 2018 on this thread, performing a clean boot would be a big help in determining if there are any possible 3rd party programs that might be affecting the performance of the computer specially if some programs got corrupted which can be determined by enabling each service one by one after each restart. If the slowdown happens when enabling one of the services, a reinstall or removing the program from the system could fix it.

In the meantime, keeping your Windows up to date specially to the latest build would ensure that any known issues on the system would be addressed by updating to the latest build which you can download and install manually on the Microsoft Update Catalog database.

We would also like to clarify if have you tried optimizing the performance of your Windows? Because there are cases wherein outdated drivers, low disk spaces, programs running on the background, or at times viruses and malwares can be one of the many reasons that could be the cause of the slow down.

If you you’ve already performed those troubleshooting, then the next one that can be done is ensuring that your current user profile is not corrupted. You’ll be able to determine that by creating a new user profile and naming it as Test. In this process, what’s being tested is the PowerShell of the current user profile or if is it the system files that are causing the slowness. If this re-occurs on the Test user profile, then a Sytem File Check (SFC) Scan is the next step to perform in addressing this as this would not only be doing a file check, but also try to fix any system file that it detects broken.

If you have further questions, please feel free to reply to this post.

Windows 10 Task Manager shows 100% CPU but Performance Monitor Shows less than 2%

Today,I have updated my PC to Windows 10 from Windows 8.1 pro.

Everything is working fine except Task Manager in Windows 10. Task Manager always shows 100% CPU , which is incorrect as per the Performance Monitor application. I have verified CPU usage with other 3rd Party application as well, which all show CPU usage as indicated by Performance Monitor. Someone please help me if there is a fix for this issue.

CPU:Intel Core i7 2600K @ 3.40GHz

RAM: 12GB

Motherboard:Intel Corporation DH67CL

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti

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CPU:Intel Core i7 2700K @ 3.50GHz @ 4.4GHz

RAM: 8GB

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770

This makes it very difficult to accurately diagnose issues.

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Im also having the same isuse with the following computer spec:

CPU:Intel Core i7 2500k @ 4.3 GHZ

RAM: 8GB

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570

Wonder if it has some weird interaction with Sandybridge chipset.

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I think I can explain this problem but I don’t have a fix. Perhaps the explanation will spur someone to figure out a fix.

The System Idle Process is missing from the task manager. As a result, 100% usage is always shown because the sum total of actual processes excluding idle time will always be 100% by definition. Therefore what you see instead is 100% total usage, and the individual processes in the list are reflecting a percentage of processor usage of what would normally remain after idle time is excluded.

For example, suppose this is the actual usage that would normally be shown:

Process Explorer 2%

Task Manager 0.2%

Total CPU: 4% (100% possible — 96% idle = 4%)

But we don’t see System Idle. Instead we see the following:

Process Explorer 50%

Total CPU: 100% (100% possible — 0% idle = 100%)

and so on. In other words the total possible CPU is 100%, so if System Idle is 96%, this leaves 4% being actually used by processes. In this example Process Explorer is using 2%, so it displays as 50% because 2% is half of 4%. In effect, total CPU us being miscalculated because System Idle is missing and so programmatically it is being treated as if it is 0%. This then breaks the calculations for total CPU time as well as the percentage calculations for each individual remaining process.

To resolve the problem, it must be understood why System Idle is not being displayed by the task manager, which probably involves some damaged registry setting. If anyone can figure this out, please post a fix.