Hesitation/occasional unresponsiveness

Recently I've been having a problem with hesitation and/or unresponsiveness while running my Windows 10 system.

I'm running Windows 10x64 Pro on a M-Tech laptop, 32 MB RAM and a i7-11800H processor with 2 SSD's. MS Office other normal desktop Applications as well as AutoCAD being run.

The problem started around the 1st of the year and the best I can tell it is related to Process System PID 4 which constantly Is using at least 5% and it normally more of the available CPU time. I read several articles how to clear various items to solve this problem but can't seem to get it to work here. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

Have you run---dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth---and ---sfc /scannow---to ensure your system is operating normally.
In Task Manager >startup have you disabled unnecessary services and only using Windows during the startup sequence.
If possible,uninstall third-party programmes and then gradually re-install,one at a time,to see if one of those is responsible for the sluggishness.
It sometimes helps to completely power-off the computer and flush the memory.
Look in Reliability History and see if there are any relevant entries..

Everything you suggested has been tried already! What I read elsewhere it appears to have something to do with the system service PID 4. I'm not sure how to get rid of it.

What about safe mode? That would exclude third party drivers that might increase the system service's activity under normal operation.

i486 said:

What about safe mode?

Yes, I've also tried that and I don't see the problem there but, I can't run many of the applications I need to run to work effectively. Dragon NaturallySpeaking and AutoCAD are 2 that specifically would not run well in safe mode. This is a fairly recent problem that I believe came from 1 of the updates, I just can't pinpoint which one are exactly when it occurred.

MSRadell said:

Yes, I've also tried that and I don't see the problem there but, I can't run many of the applications I need to run to work effectively. Dragon NaturallySpeaking and AutoCAD are 2 that specifically would not run well in safe mode. This is a fairly recent problem that I believe came from 1 of the updates, I just can't pinpoint which one are exactly when it occurred.

The system process/service seems to handle all utilized drivers, so you could run LatencyMon since it can also display the time the system takes in processing those drivers. It should theoretically reveal drivers that have an unusually high impact on performance. It may be valuable information in your case.

That would be fortunate, if it was a driver. A sudden bottleneck in SATA read/write speed introduced by an update would be difficult to diagnose without rolling back an update, but drive bechmarking programs might still give you a clue.

If you are able to use System Restore,backup or clone to eliminate suspect updates and also temporarily disconnect from the internet,then you should be able to determine whether or not an update is responsible.