High CPU Usage at Idle

nikhilr51 said:

Cheers for the tip mint waxed, im sure thatll be helpful to the next person who stumbles accross this thread :)

Mine was on 5% though so all good.

Thanks again dalchina, i've gone through and re-enabled all the apps and processes I need, and everything is still fine. Maybe in the future i'll go back and find out which one exactly was causing the problem (if i do i'll report back here for sure). But for now it's all good!

I've read your post again and my reply did not address your actual problem. I guess I had some kind of brain fog at the time. My apologizes for sending you on a wild goose chase. Glad your idle was at the 5% default.

Mint Waxed said:

I've read your post again and my reply did not address your actual problem. I guess I had some kind of brain fog at the time. My apologizes for sending you on a wild goose chase. Glad your idle was at the 5% default.

No problem :)

It was still a good suggestion!

FYI I had this same issue when I was using any browser (for anyone that reaches this in a search).

It turns out it is the wireless driver, when I tested that theory by plugging in the Ethernet cable, the problem does not occur. The machine also comes back from being in sleep mode and gives the user/pw prompt immediately instead of hanging like it used to.

My built in wireless card is an Intel Dual Band Wireless_AC 7265.

I'm going to try and update the driver after an uninstall/reinstall and if that doesn't work, I'll try a USB wireless card with new driver.

nikhilr51 said:

Cheers for the tip mint waxed, im sure thatll be helpful to the next person who stumbles accross this thread :)

Mine was on 5% though so all good.

Thanks again dalchina, i've gone through and re-enabled all the apps and processes I need, and everything is still fine. Maybe in the future i'll go back and find out which one exactly was causing the problem (if i do i'll report back here for sure). But for now it's all good!

I notice this sort of problem after Windows has about a month of uptime. When screen saver (specifically monitor shuts off to standby via Windows power management), normally system is idle and monitor LED turns amber and screen is off. But after some weeks, an anomaly occurs where monitor LED stays green, but backlight shuts off, then flashes on/off every few seconds. Simultaneously, there is lots of disc activity, as seen by flashing disc LED. When I press a key to 'wake' the PC, I see that all processor cores in Taskman are showing 100% spikes and is very dynamic up/down graphs.
Rebooting fixes the problem for several weeks until it returns eventually. Just another Windows 10 quirk?