Windows 7 has High CPU Usage and slow performance

Anonymous
2009-11-18T04:59:29+00:00

Hello all,

I've searched the forums, but was unable to find anything relevant.  I recently upgraded to Windows 7 from Vista.  It was running fine for about a week then all of a sudden everything started running very slow.  I checked the the processes tab in task manager and I am constantly running at 70-80% CPU usage.  I think this is very high considering the computer is only a few months old.  It seems like others are having this problem as well, but no real solutions.

I have turned off file indexing as well as disabled the HD audio device. 

Please help!

Here are my hardware specs:

AMD 9550 Quad-Core

64-bit

6GB Ram

Thank you in advance for your help.  I am ready to toss this thing from my second story window.

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Windows update

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Anonymous
2010-01-02T19:29:42+00:00

I think the answer might be the Windows Media Player and Windows Media Network Sharing Services as zxypher suggested.  The fix for that is to adjust were the Windows Media Player services search for media files. 

It seems to be a bad problem for me as well upgrading from Vista to Windows 7.  The default search location for media is set to C:\Users\ instead of down in the My Music folders.

Go into Media Player.  From the menu -> File -> Manage libraries -> select each library (music, video, pictures, recorded tv [if you have]) and check the paths that it is managing and make sure it is not too close to the root of the C: drive.  For example, it should be something like c:\users\Jim\Music and c:\users\Public\Music BUT NOT **** c:\users as they will cause the whole directory tree to be re-indexed over and over (when you surf the web or change any files in your profile).

If you have multiple users who login to the computer, you may need to repeat the process for each user if all users have added managed folders which are actively changing on a regular basis.

If this is your issue and you do it correctly, then the high CPU should drop in minutes (or seconds down to nothing).

This is the CORRECT way to adjust the WMNSS/WMPNetwk.exe process issues.

A little more information can be found here:

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7performance/thread/2fe4901b-2eaf-4a99-b487-e6a6213b10b3/

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  1. Anonymous
    2010-07-14T13:18:33+00:00

    Yes, it's system managed; I tried playing around with the settings a little bit. It was on "Automatically mange paging file size for all drives"; so I unchecked that and set it to System Managed size (which, didn't really change from the above).. Maybe I'll try moving it to another drive and see if that has any impact on the issue. Thank you for the suggestion (and the idea/walkthrough of using xperf to identify the issue)

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  2. Anonymous
    2010-07-14T10:57:12+00:00

    When oyu have a high count of MmGetPageFileInformation maybe you have an issue with your Pagefile. What are your current setting? Did you let the system manage the size? Play abit around with the pagefile settings.


    "A programmer is just a tool which converts caffeine into code" CLIP- Stellvertreter http://www.winvistaside.de/

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  3. Anonymous
    2010-07-14T03:09:52+00:00

    I'm also having this problem and have followed the instructions for using xperf to identify what is causing the high CPU issue. My issue is a little bit different as it results in 100% CPU usage across all 6 cores of my processor, which completely paralyzes the machine. It happens after the machine has completed booting; ~1-2 minutes after, and then the CPU usage increases by 100%/6 every 10 seconds, until it is at 100%. I'm currently typing this in the 100% usage state which makes it very difficult, but I managed to sucessfully run xperf and get a stack trace. It seeI don't think I could upload the 50MB file before the computer freezes, so I exported it as a CSV and have uploaded it to pastebin here: http://pastebin.com/r00mSpHN (the Count's are low, because I selected a smaller time period for generating the table)

    The culprit seems to be Mmgetpagefileinformation, but unfortunately I am unable to find any references to this function anywhere online, except for a few research kernel pages. I'm not really sure where to go from here; if you would like me to upload the entire trace, I might be able to.  Please let me know if you are able to offer any insight into this or need any additional information. Unfortunately this does not seem like a driver problem like most other people's :( thanks for the help!

    Garrett

    My system is as follows

    CPU: AMD Phenom X6 3.2GHz

    RAM: 4GB

    HDD: Primary - 320GB IDE; most of the other 8 are 1TB SATA

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  4. Anonymous
    2010-07-14T02:10:40+00:00

    Andre,

    Downloaded the drivers previously and installed them both using the autoinstaller and manually.  I did it again though and the problem persists.  Any other ideas?

    Thanks again.  I have temporarily fixed it by making my computer hibernate instead of sleep.  When it wakes up from hibernation (as long as it's been hibernating for some time), the cpu usage drops down to 0% when idle again.  The problem only occurs when the computer goes to sleep or when I log off.

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