High CPU- and RAM-usage after Windows Anniversary update

As the title says, my PC was viciously mauled by the latest major windows update.

Thanks to a certain video I managed to lower my CPU-usage from 100% (by going into REGEDIT and through the path HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>SYSTEM>Ndu>Start and changing the value from 2 to 4) to 20%. It stills sits idly at 20% even when I'm doing absolutely nothing which I find slightly infuriating. (see image 1)

(Excuse me for the language being swedish, I hope the general details are at least fairly clear.)

Now, CPU. It will rest at ~2% when I'm not doing anything (as in, staring at the performance window with every single program closed down), and then spike sporadically whenever I do anything.

This is a picture of my CPU during the course of (spike 1) Opening google Chrome. 2. Going to facebook. 3. Opening a new tab, going to youtube and closing down the previous tab. And then the rest is simply starting a video and listening to it.


I really want to like Windows 10, but this is the third time I've had performance leaks with this bloody OS that I'm starting to really lose my patience. Any help on the matter is greatly appreciated!

Resource Monitor will be your friend as well. You should be able to see which process(es) are taxing your CPU. Your memory usage is pretty average so I wouldn't be concerned with that.

This is how things are looking right now. Like I said, the CPU will spike and consume nearly 60% just to perform a simple action like opening a new tab in google chrome or opening Steam.

The memory seems stable enough and I might resolve to called that fixed by what I already did, but I find it odd that my 16GB RAM should be taxed to 20% when I have literally nothing running and only a few programs even go above the 1% mark.

Neemobeer said:

Resource Monitor will be your friend as well. You should be able to see which process(es) are taxing your CPU. Your memory usage is pretty average so I wouldn't be concerned with that.

The issue I seem to have is that the math doesn't quite check out. If I look at all the processes that are visible to me, that should square down to something like 3-4% or maybe 1 GB if I'm generous. There's a lot of memory that seems to go nowhere, considering that 18% != 1/16 or 4%

Memory usage does not seem at all unreasonable. If I had 16 GB RAM I would like to see the usage higher.

You can't expect the process memory usage as shown to add up to total usage, or anything even close. It was never intended that it would.
First, Task manager isn't showing full process memory usage.
Second, there are some very significant users of memory that are not processes, not all of which are shown in Task Manager. These include the Non paged pool, resident portion of the Paged pool, and the file cache. The latter can be quite high in a 64 bit OS and it isn't shown anywhere except in total usage.

Memory usage in any modern OS is too complex to be accounted for by adding up a column of numbers.

Memory usage in a modern OS is HIGHLY dynamic. Depending on the situation the usage of any individual process can vary by a factor of 100 or more. Memory usage now may seem high but that is only because there is no better use for it. Memory was intended to be used, not sit idle. But if a large application is started this usage will be trimmed back as necessary. I have seen this many times.

CPU usage is another matter but I can't help you with that.

Brobocop said:

The issue I seem to have is that the math doesn't quite check out. If I look at all the processes that are visible to me, that should square down to something like 3-4% or maybe 1 GB if I'm generous. There's a lot of memory that seems to go nowhere, considering that 18% != 1/16 or 4%

That is normal. While task manager will report the total memory in use it doesn't break out the system cached memory, plus you need to account for the cached memory. The other important piece to take into account is the memory manager maps what are called views in a given files, these views are 256KBs in size at a given offset in the file. So if the program is only requesting a given portion of code that is say 10KBs the memory manager will still map a 256KB chunk, so to the program listed in task manager it's only using 10KBs for that piece of code but to the OS it's using 256KBs