Driven to high CPU usage-Lenonvo G500

Hi all,

new to forum..

I have a lenovo G500 lappy which is a couple of years old and came with win 8.1.

I ran the "upgrade" to win 10 and i liked it. Unfortunately, recently i have been having what i now know is a common problem. I have done some googling and reading.

When i hit task manager i find that cpu is being driven high with apparently not a lot going on !

I am currently running win 10 in safe mode as i type and have malwarebytes running to do a full scan to see if anything can be found.

In safe mode and this browser running, plus task manager cpu load ranges from maybe 4% to 17 %.

If i were to boot into normal mode it would be running from 50-99% with nothing much running save for background processes.

Things i have tried so far..

Booted with linux live on a usb stick...CPU load is zero or low

Run in safe mode,,cpu is normal/low

Monitored ip traffic using netstat -a in cmd window and dididnt see anything untoward though i may have missed something..

Run a malwarebytes scan in normal win 10 mode and found nothing.

actioned various suggestions found on the web for high cpu useage.


Now i would have thought that after all these years,windows would just "work",,but alas no..

Any thoughts?

Thanks

PS forgot to add that when in normal mode, the main drivers for the cpu high level shown in task manager are

system
windows defender

I think ive finally killed it. Noted an item in task manager called node-js javascript.

Tracked it to an executable called node.exe which was found in a folder as part of a free software package called "prey"

See Prey | Track find stolen Phones, Tablets and Laptops

Managed to delete it all and the fan suddenly went quiet in lappy..cpu use down...often fully quieting to zero,,im monitoring before marking solved.

Trouble is ive probably messed up lots of other things in win10 by trying to fix this !