CPU hog

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I wonder whether anyone would be kind enough to help explain something that’s driving me nuts. While happily typing away in my word processor I sometimes note at totally unpredictable moments a delay in what I’m typing appearing on the screen. And then suddenly it will appear, sometimes half a line long, all in a rush, but with letters missing. Something is gobbling up my CPU but I can’t work out what, mainly because the Performance tab in the Windows Task Manager (I have a Win7 machine) doesn’t have a time scale, so I can’t see what was happening back a minute ago. At other times the word processor is totally unresponsive to input. I thought I had isolated the problem by watching the CPU usage in the resource monitor and clicking on a peak value (up as high as 18). It was MsMpEng.exe, which is Microsoft Security Essentials, so I uninstalled and reinstalled that – but no joy. And no it isn’t a virus. I’ve scanned with MSE, Malwarebytes, F-Secure, Sophos Virus Removal Tool and Spybot. Nix, nada. I took a quick look just now when the computer was completely idle, and there were sudden CPU peaks of 50%. Does anyone have any idea what could be going on? At other times everything is fine. And there are no scans going on in the background.

Mike

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Maybe your computer is just too slow to run all the things you have installed.
What is the computer spec?
What software do you have running at start up?
How much free disk space do you have?

cheers, Paul

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Paul thanks, but no, it’s not that. 2.20 Ghz processor, 10 gig memory, 64-bit system, free disk space on C: 74 gig, and here’s a screen shot on what’s running now, end of the working day:
45676-cpu

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I have a similar problem. From time to time, whatever program I am in stops responding so I can’t type or do anything (it will sometimes say “Not responding”), and the cursor turns into a whirlygig. This might last for a few seconds, or for a minute or more. I have monitors in place for both CPU usage and disk usage, and during this time there is no unusual activity for either. There is other stuff running, like AV, but nothing exceptional. It’s as though the system is just waiting for something, but I don’t know what. Like the OP, I have run all the checks I can think of, and no malware is reported. It seems to happen most in Word and Outlook, but maybe that’s just because I use them the most – it can happen in other programs as well. During the time that a program is locked up like that, I can move to another program and it will work normally.

I’m thinking that perhaps some resource limit has been reached, and the system is waiting for it to clear?

Running Win10, 64 bits, 8 gig of memory (of which less than half is in use at the time), and about 887 Gig of free space on drive C.

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Under Processes click on Memory and that will sort them into highest user first.

If it’s a Service Host then right click on it and select Go to services and whichever it lands on at the bottom, that is the hog – it could be an auto check for updates.

Make a note of the time these occur and then check Event Viewer’s time stamped errors or reliability history to see if they have recorded anything.

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Well it’s not a Service Host, but the Event Viewer is throwing up a couple of interesting tidbits, but they’re inconclusive until I start noting the time when all the typed words get stuck in a queue. There does, however, seem to be quite a lot of Word Software Protection Service Platform activity going on, and Google has quite a few gripes about it. Thanks to all; to be continued.

Mike

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If Word is involved, much of the ‘lag’ could be from paging, most of the MS Office programs backup to the page/swap file as soon as you enter an ‘edit’ mode (just clicking inside an open document would probably trigger this). What hardware, CPU/RAM/HDD/SSD is in your PC?

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It’s possible that your anti-virus does periodic scans, which can eat up CPU cycles. Check the schedule.

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It’s possible that your anti-virus does periodic scans, which can eat up CPU cycles. Check the schedule.

Well nothing of any interest shows up in the Event Viewer for the times I noted yesterday and today, I don’t use Word much (I’m a WordPerfect fan), and none of my anti-virus apps have a schedule selected. I prefer to do manual scans. So the mystery remains, although the problem was far less bothersome today than yesterday. And no, I haven’t installed any new programs in the past few days. But many thanks to all of you for your suggestions.

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