Windows 8 100% CPU usage.

[Redflyingmonkey]

Hey.

 

So I know it's a "common" issue with Windows 8, but I was lucky and managed to avoid it until now. i've had my laptop for a little more than a year now, and I've noticed very recently that the CPU usage sometimes goes to 99%, and gets locked at 100% for some minutes. It's not just a glitch in the task manager, I can hear the fans running at an abnormal speed and the related movements in the hard drive. For the moment, it's not critical or anything, the laptop doesn't seem damaged, but I'm afraid if it carries on something's gonna go full bonkers.

 

I've googled the issue a number of times, but it seems like what worked for others do not work for me, the problem is still preset even after stopping or uninstalling the programs people advised to stop. My laptop is being taken care of ; no spywares, no viruses, formatted, cleaned up, updated properly, fans are clean too, I've also made one factory reset last week just in case. 

 

Problems started when I lent my laptop to my gf's dad for some days, but the only thing he did was writing his screenplays and browsing some porn. Ah, I did put some folders in hiding mode before lending it to him (didn't really want him to see what kind of stuff I'm installing on my Skyrim yeah), but apart from that nothing really changed from usual. 

 

Do you guys have any ideas what could be causing this ? I'm also asking on french forums and went to a computer tech lab, but they couldn't figure it out. Warranty expired too, and HP's customer service sucks ass anyway. 

 

 

[pavelius_pavlentius]

in your power plan select your power scheme, enter the additional settings, find the cpu power, lower the minimum processor usage to 1%. i have a laptop, when i do this thing, i raised the battery life from 1 hour to 5(!).

[Redflyingmonkey]

It's already at 1%, it's one of the many answers I've seen on google, but it didn't fix my issue :/ 

[hentaijin]

Run a virus scan just to be safe. malware bytes or similar scanner on all your local drives.

[Redflyingmonkey]

Did that already, Adw Cleaner and Mwb, even Roguekiller, full Avast scan too. 

[Rayblue]

Have you pulled up Task Manager to check which processes are hogging the system?

[Redflyingmonkey]

It's "System" actually lol, but it only takes 0.3 mo/s, which is a normal number. There's superfetch too that jumps at 1.5 mo/s, but calms down after a while. Both those numbers light up in dark orange in the task manager, like they are undergoing heavy process, even though their number is the average. 

 

Starting to wonder if my CPU is not starting to scream for help or something. Still weird though, I'm not stressing it that much, it should be able to handle the very light gaming I do on it and except from that, I'm only using it to write tests for the students or check mails. 

[Rayblue]

I can't think of anything else, but since the laptop is past its warranty, have you tried taking it apart (there should be a disassembly PDF manual that's usually issued to technicians) and cleaning it? 

[Redflyingmonkey]

Took it to my nerd friends in tech college, they got the right tools and did it for me. Didn't change anything again 

I'm just going to give it to someone, I can't even take it to work since it's making spaceship like sounds in class, fuck that shit ! Spent all day trying everything possible to fix it, Windows 8 sucks ass and that's it. 

[hentaijin]

Took it to my nerd friends in tech college, they got the right tools and did it for me. Didn't change anything again 

I'm just going to give it to someone, I can't even take it to work since it's making spaceship like sounds in class, fuck that shit ! Spent all day trying everything possible to fix it, Windows 8 sucks ass and that's it. 

Every other windows release is shit

Windows xp was good

vista is forgotten

7 is great

8 is poo

10 (Mircosoft decided to skip 9...) should be the true successor to 7

[nvidiot]

Windows Defender is to blame for this calamity. It has a nasty habit of sometimes popping up to 100% CPU usage out of the blue. I'd suggest using an alternative AV solution. I use BitDefender free edition due to its power-user friendliness and very light memory footprint. It also comes without added bloat and no nagging ads, which I really like. Highly recommended.

[Demonwise]

Actually I recall this happening to my previous laptop. Though it was a Win Vista OS and it was like 5-6 years old. Hah, at that point Task Manager took up like 80-100% of the processor. The time it took to boot up from a cold start to open Firefox was something like 20 minutes.

[Redflyingmonkey]

Windows Defender is to blame for this calamity. It has a nasty habit of sometimes popping up to 100% CPU usage out of the blue. I'd suggest using an alternative AV solution. I use BitDefender free edition due to its power-user friendliness and very light memory footprint. It also comes without added bloat and no nagging ads, which I really like. Highly recommended.

 

Now that you're talking about it, I'm seeing something called "Antimalware Service Executable" in the task manager, I'm pretty sure it's Windows Defender. How would I go disabling it completely and getting another AV without Windows Update turning it back on every time ? 

[pinky6225]

 

Windows Defender is to blame for this calamity. It has a nasty habit of sometimes popping up to 100% CPU usage out of the blue. I'd suggest using an alternative AV solution. I use BitDefender free edition due to its power-user friendliness and very light memory footprint. It also comes without added bloat and no nagging ads, which I really like. Highly recommended.

 

Now that you're talking about it, I'm seeing something called "Antimalware Service Executable" in the task manager, I'm pretty sure it's Windows Defender. How would I go disabling it completely and getting another AV without Windows Update turning it back on every time ? 

 

 

Their are setting in the action centre and it should detect you have another AV present

 

I don't have windows 8 so not had this problem, i did have something similiar occur whenever i viewed media files which after much googling i found was a flaw with how windows 7 does thumbnails, turning that off prevented it from happening again.

[ТigегШооd]

run tdss killer & reboot, if that don't work reset the bios

[Guest quintles]

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2027511/windows-disk-usage-100-problem.html

 

Have you tried the solution from here of going to services and disabling super-fetch and windows search or at least setting them to manual or turning them off completely? I had the exact same problem as you and this fixed it.

 

I have a partitioned hard-drive and I think Windows tried to index both sections every time I booted. And then Defender scanned every index. And then the indexing failed. And it went on and on until I disabled it.

[Redflyingmonkey]

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2027511/windows-disk-usage-100-problem.html

 

Have you tried the solution from here of going to services and disabling super-fetch and windows search or at least setting them to manual or turning them off completely? I had the exact same problem as you and this fixed it.

 

I have a partitioned hard-drive and I think Windows tried to index both sections every time I booted. And then Defender scanned every index. And then the indexing failed. And it went on and on until I disabled it.

 

Well damn, thank you, I disabled Superfetch but I had no idea I had to deactivate it completely for the issue to go away, someone posting on that forum made me realize it. Can't believe it was this simple ... 

[nvidiot]

 

Windows Defender is to blame for this calamity. It has a nasty habit of sometimes popping up to 100% CPU usage out of the blue. I'd suggest using an alternative AV solution. I use BitDefender free edition due to its power-user friendliness and very light memory footprint. It also comes without added bloat and no nagging ads, which I really like. Highly recommended.

 

Now that you're talking about it, I'm seeing something called "Antimalware Service Executable" in the task manager, I'm pretty sure it's Windows Defender. How would I go disabling it completely and getting another AV without Windows Update turning it back on every time ? 

 

 

No need to disable it via services.msc. Just type windows defender in search, open it and go in its option. There's an option to turn off the defender program from there, but if you install bitdefender AV, it will automatically be turned off, so no need to manually turn it off.

 

It also wouldn't hurt disabling indexing, offline files & auto-defrag either. I'd refrain from disabling superfetch though, especially if you're using a traditional hard drive other than SSD.

[Guest quintles]

 

 

 

Well damn, thank you, I disabled Superfetch but I had no idea I had to deactivate it completely for the issue to go away, someone posting on that forum made me realize it. Can't believe it was this simple ... 

 

 

Glad to help and it is good to hear that it worked.