Windows 10 Anniversary Update high CPU usage

Hi, I clean installed from USB flash drive Windows 10 AU aka version 1607, have been experiencing high CPU usage with certain programs,


Troubleshooting done:
- Disabled system services not needed for daily usage, including Windows update service set to Disabled.
-Method 3 and 4 from here Windows 10 High CPU Usage Fixes
-SFC/scannow says Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations
-Disabled firewall and on-access scanning in Bitdefender total security 2016
-Set power settings to high performance, sleep and hibernation all turned off
-User Account Control turned off never notify


Programs affected by high CPU usage:
-Microsoft Edge
-Chrome
-Firefox
-Adobe Reader
-iTunes


Symptoms started upon connecting my laptop to the Internet after installing latest version of Intel wifi driver. All Intel drivers are taken from Station-Drivers - NEWS


Intel drivers for chipset, management engine interface, dynamic platform and thermal framework, Intel HD graphics were injected into install.wim on another desktop computer before making bootable USB flash drive using Rufus.


Upon opening above-mentioned programs, CPU usage spikes to 70-100% and fluctuating up and down, for Microsoft Edge it occurs only when visiting some websites such as Google or Microsoft sites.


Chrome, Firefox, Adobe Reader, iTunes, are all latest available versions, CPU usage shoots to 100% once I open them up causing program freeze and the only way is to end task in task manager.


List of installed programs:
-Adobe Reader
-Bitdefender total security 2016
-Chrome
-Firefox
-iTunes
-Nvidia graphics driver 368.81


Tech specs:
Asus UX303LN Zenbook
Intel Core i7 5500U 2.40GHz
Nvidia 840M graphics
Windows 10 Version 1607 Build 14393.51
HDD replaced with my own Plextor M5 Pro SSD 256GB
BIOS is latest available version from ASUS website version 206, March 2015


Thanks for all help.

dalchina said:

Hi, can you please post a screenshot of your task manager showing this- make sure you click the CPU tab to organise processes, highest use at the top. Without knowing which process or processes are using CPU resources, it's something of a guessing game. Thanks.

Also, please try a clean boot, then try launching Edge or other programs you have this issue with that you can run then. Do you have the same problem?

Meanwhile I have searched the forum for
'high cpu use' - try 'solved high cpu use'

There are many threads. Please feel free to do the same, read thru and see if anything helps.
The forum is a great resource where people may have already solved your problem.

The OP specifically said "after" the big anniversary update. So doing a search for similar posts really isn't the way as this particular anniversary update has done A LOT of changes under the hood. You can clearly see from your snapshot the dates of each thread...all of them "before" this big anniversary update. This big update greatly modified Windows 10 as a whole. It's basically equivalent to say Windows 7 SP1 SP2 Updates from the past, maybe even bigger than those as this changed quite a few things more under the hood.

Anyways, From what i noticed after i did the anniversary update is that i also noticed a lot of differences in resources being used after this big anniversary update. Example....personally i have my rig fine tuned and custom optimized so that while my PC is idle...Windows 10 only uses 700mb of system ram. I achieve this from turning off a lot of unneeded "services" running in the background and other things like Cortana 100% disabled (which isn't easy to do) and a bunch of other system tweaks i've done to get my system using very very minimal resources for CPU and Ram,etc. BUT, after this big anniversary update, my system now uses 1000mb/1gb of system ram now. I did notice that a lot of settings under the hood were reset after the big update so i had to manually go back through and disable some of them again.

Basically, OP, If you fine tuned your Win10 OS like i did, you may have to go over everything again to find if anything was reset back to "default" after doing this big anniversary update. Again, this type of thing really boils down to if you are into doing your own custom tweaks under the hood or not. The average person won't feel comfortable doing such things like i do but if you are like me..again, i can only recommend going over any edits/disables/tweaks you may have done prior to this big Anniversary update. Personally, i got my system back down to 700mb system ram usage on idle and CPU is about 1% to 5% on idle as well.