Extremely High idle CPU Usage Windows 8.1

mattyjim123 · 28 Apr 2014 at 20:43

I need wee bit of help guys..

Just recently I've noticed my idle CPU usage to be 60-100% all the time.

In task manager, none of my processes really stand out as the culprit, and under the users tab, my user isn't using nearly as much as the total CPU usage. :confused:

What do I do?

I'm the only user on the computer.
Windows 8.1
i5-3570k

Thanks for any help.

Jamin280672 · 28 Apr 2014 at 20:52

Scan for virus's and malware would be my first step.

mattyjim123 · 28 Apr 2014 at 20:59

Just did a scan with Avast free, and nothing came up, any other programs that might show something?

SilverTongue · 28 Apr 2014 at 21:01

malwarebytes antimalware would be a good one to run

mattyjim123 · 28 Apr 2014 at 21:05

Will give that a quick scan

mattyjim123 · 28 Apr 2014 at 22:21

Ok, I blue screened and after a lot of driver issues etc etc, I just decided to do a complete fresh install of windows 8. Probably wont be updating to 8.1.

Thanks for the help anyway

CPU idle is at 3% now by the way

Purgatory · 28 Apr 2014 at 22:25

Try Process Explorer v16.02 and see if that shows a process with high CPU use. It's more advanced than Windows Task Manager and made by Microsoft and part of the Sysinternals Suite.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/bb896653

Jamin280672 · 28 Apr 2014 at 23:01

Im currently on 8.1 update 1 without any issues, it could be maybe the hal was playing up or got corrupt, happened to someone else on these forums recently where it wasn't detecting all of his cores on his CPU, I think he had a quad core and it was only showing 1, a reformat sorted it for him too.