Computers CPU Usage High ?

Is your computers CPU usage high ? If so your computer will no doubt be crawling along.

This could be caused by a single process hogging all the processors time, or multiple processes which together add up to put a large load on the processor.

There are a number of reasons why a process forces high processor usage

The process is complex and the processor is struggling to deal with it, causing the computer to freeze or run slow in the process.

The application for the process is old and does not support the abilities of the new generation of processors such as multi-threading to make use of a processors multiple cores.

A prime example of this is Excel 2003 we run reports on this that will tie up the processor, when we examine the processor usage only a single core is being used, but very heavily.

The report eventually took 2 hours to run, after this as a test we run the same report using Excel 2007, on a Quad core processor the report took 16 minutes to process.

CPU usage high - check with Task Manager to find out which process is causing this.

this can be accessed by either right clicking on the task bar and selecting Task manager, or by Hitting the keys CTRL, ALT, DEL all together and now selecting Task Manager.

Now you will be presented with the Windows Task Manager screen, you will be able to see which applications are currently running under the relevant tab, but this tells us very little apart from the name, so if you go to the Processes tab you will see everything that’s running including any applications listed under the Application tab, you can also now see which process is causing the issue.

If you click where it says CPU on the top of the heading it will index the processes by the amount of CPU usage they are taking.

As above we can see the process avcore.dll (which runs with Magic Video Converter) is causing relatively high processor usage taking up 50% of the processors time, we can also see its primarily running on a single core.

In a computer that is idling and not doing too much you should see the task System Idle Process, this is showing how much of the processors capabilities is not being used.

But any other process is connected to an application which is running, so you should be able to see the process using high processor usage.

Now if you click on the next tab Performance, you will be able to see how many processors your computer has.

As you can see mine is dual core and any applications/processes running are pretty evenly distributed across both of these cores.

If I were running an application that was tying up the processor and it did not support multiple processors or cores, then the CPU on the right would be totally out of sync with the other as one works hard and the other sits by doing pretty much nothing.

If we now go back to the Processes tab you’ll notice that names of processes don’t always have the same name as the application.

Much of the time we can work out what process is tied to what application such as Microsoft Word = WINWORD.EXE but this can be a real problem when we see processes that don’t see to correspond to application name, which is mostly the case.

Unless you’re really sure of what the process does ending a process can have dire results if an application or report is running or a CD is being cut and then suddenly terminated.

So make sure you know what process your are ending, the easiest way is to simply Google the processor or ask on our forum.

Another way is to download a free application such as Process Viewer, this gives you a break down of which process is connected to which application, it also gives you warning colours if it finds the process to be suspect or possible malware.

CPU usage high for any other reasons? ask on our forum

CPU usage high ? did you know a laptop that's overheating can give similar symptoms

CPU usage high, find more possible causes

Slow laptop? Find out more on how to speed up a slow running laptop
Got a slow laptop? What have you tried to get it running faster? Read our article on hardware and software performance, get your laptop running faster.
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