Opened programs will use up to 50-100% CPU no matter how big or small the application.

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K_Tarr

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Jan 26, 2015
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I've had this problem for about a year or two on my 8 year old HP Pavilion laptop.

Initially, I thought it was because I upgraded from Vista (OS that was installed on it initially) to Windows 7 and had downloaded a lot of one-time, third party programs on it without performing proper maintenance and security after installing and removing them.

I reformatted my system and even installed a brand new internal hard drive (after my old one practically died) to install Windows 7 on and to start my system with a clean slate. It ran fine for a while, this time with proper maintenance and anti-virus / malware protection, but after a few months of almost constant use, my computer still ran slow and used mostly 80-100% CPU when running Chrome and iTunes simultaneously, and around 50-60% CPU when I would open something as small as Task Mananger and/or Control Panel. I couldn't do something simple as listen to an album in iTunes and open a new tab in Chrome without the song sputtering almost every 5 seconds due to lack of resources, to give you an example of how bad the CPU usage was...

So now that I've performed a clean install of Windows 10, I've noticed my computer is running faster than it was with 7, but I can't help but notice that when I open a new instance of ANYTHING (even as small as opening "My Documents"), it will spike up to 99-100% CPU then fluctuate until resting at around 10% a minute or so later.

This laptop is running an Intel Core2 Duo Processor (T5250 @ 1.50GHz, 1500 Mhz) and 4 GB of RAM.


 
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It is most likely that the cpu is reaching its limits. The cpu is very weak and is not designed for multitasking. It could be that you have a lot of background processes which is running causing the slowdown. I would upgrade the ram though as this could help as it takes some of the load of the cpu. Make sure that you are only using the programs you want.
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Greenpernod

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Aug 5, 2015
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ctrl alt delete(task manager) will show the percentage of how much of your computer random access memory your using(4gb ram)at 100% all of this is being used. Your computer needs to load the information your accessing from your internal hard drive which i assume is a spinning hd not an solid state drive(like a big usb stick). This takes longer because the hard disk drives are slower than the solid state drives. Also its better that the ram is being used to 100% because that means the cpu is working if it was 50% capacity when chrome and itunes was loading that would mean you would see speeds twice as slow.When you open just task manager does it spike and show a high percentage and then level off after a second to a minute. On my computer is spikes to 40%cpu for about 2 seconds then goes down to 1-3% once task manager has loaded(windows 8.1,8 core 4.7 ghz processor and ssd drive and 16gb of ram). I'd say if you wanted faster speeds see if you can increase the ram to 8gb to increase your load speeds and also see how fast your internal harddrive was to your old internal hardrive and see if there was a difference.
 
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K_Tarr

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Jan 26, 2015
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You might have worded wrong or misread my problem. It's the CPU that's running at high percentages, not my RAM. It's not a case of performance--even though it's hurting in this category--but functionality. If my computer's CPU is always overworking itself, the overall system becomes sluggish and doesn't run properly (ie. computer can't handle to multi-task, run moderately big applications.)

When my desktop computer is dormant and no applications are running, the highest I see the CPU usage is 8%. On my laptop, it'll go as high as 30% with nothing running other than the processes and services. My problem is not knowing why my laptop's CPU is doing so much work despite not being used or what services or processes are running in the background that is making it work so hard.

Thanks for the response.


 
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Greenpernod

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Aug 5, 2015
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download https://www.malwarebytes.org/antimalware/ you can run it in safe mode. You may find something with it. Also i thought i knew what i was talking about but looking into it I've found that processes ctrl alt delete is not connected to RAM/memory. Always thought they were linked directly.
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-performance/windows-7-has-high-cpu-usage-and-slow-performance/b5c79a15-781b-455a-9003-6d305695fce0 this may help something to do with windows media player if you had files in playlists when you switched over from vista to windows 7 and the directories are messed. If you got the new harddrive and didn't add any files from your vista harddrive then i don't think this is the issue.
 
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velo3100

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Jun 22, 2014
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It is most likely that the cpu is reaching its limits. The cpu is very weak and is not designed for multitasking. It could be that you have a lot of background processes which is running causing the slowdown. I would upgrade the ram though as this could help as it takes some of the load of the cpu. Make sure that you are only using the programs you want.
 
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K_Tarr

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Jan 26, 2015
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Thanks for the response. Unfortunately my system isn't capable of upgrading to more RAM over 4GB. The laptop I had was a special entertainment edition of the HP Pavilion dv6000 released around '06-'07 which I'm guessing isn't the best for type of laptop for multitasking.

With the replies I've been getting, it sounds like my laptop just can't keep up with the newer functioning applications and programs without it using many of its resources, which doesn't bother me as much as the possibility of the system being infected or internally damaged which doesn't seem to be the case after some diagnostics and scans.

 
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