Laptop CPU temp and low performance

aPCuser23

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Nov 24, 2015
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I have an HP laptop, its about five years old. It has a T4300 CPU at 2,094.75 MHz. The performance has decreased significantly over time and I wonder if its mainly age or if I can do something about it. It has windows vista. The CPU load is always over 50% thou. On the task manager the main process is svchost.exe at over 40% most of the time. It only showed this after I clicked "show processes from all users". I wonder if this is normal.

I recently downloaded realtemp but the temp is always at 63 C, it never changes, I wonder if this is normal or if maybe the sensors are not working.

What is the best way to improve performance or what hardware piece might be deteriorated? Thanks.
 
The few times I've seen this, it's been due to pending Windows Updates. If you haven't run Windows Update in a while, do so. Then reboot, then run Update again, then reboot, run Update again, etc. The last laptop I ran across which had this problem (was also a Core 2 Duo era CPU), I had to do this 5 or 6 times before all the Updates finally installed and the problem went away.

I don't know what it is about Windows Update, but it seems to chew up CPU cycles on these older CPUs after it's partially installed an update and is waiting for a reboot.

The temp probably stayed at 63 C because your CPU was always loaded so never had a chance to cool off.
 

aPCuser23

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Nov 24, 2015
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You mean that even if I am not running the updates automatically and they are not being downloaded, something still eats cpu from the updates program?

 

Yes, that is exactly what was happening with my dad's laptop. It ran hot like that for 3 weeks until I had a chance to take a look at it. Repeatedly installing updates and rebooting eventually fixed it.