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
    2011-04-03T16:19:50+00:00

    While this is not a great answer here's somethign I discovered on my own ... I opened up the Device Manager and set the VIEW to "Resources by Type" and basically started going through there disabling things until I saw a change. I found an entry under MEMORY cald something like "HD Audio" (I can't see it anymore since I disabled it ... I don't know where it went to.) 

    *Disabling High Definition (HD) Audio Controller leaves you without sound. I do not suggest following this advice. It took me a while to remedy the end result.

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  2. Anonymous
    2011-03-28T15:41:17+00:00

    I had the same problem as everyone else in this forum - quality of computer use running down to zero because my CPU was running up to 100% while idle. After looking at several posts, I simply shut down windows media network sharing service under my services (start -> control panel -> services (click stop service)). Then to make sure the problem did not arise in the future I right clicked the service WMNSS and made it manual. After doing this my CPU went immediately from an average of 80% down to 20%.

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  3. Anonymous
    2011-03-02T19:23:47+00:00

    Hello,

    I recently reloaded the operating system on my all purpose server PC but I'm having a serious issue. I installed Windows 7 64 bit on an ASRock ALiveNF6G-VSTA (nVIDIA nForce 6100-430) motherboard. The CPU is an old Phenom 9850BE with 4GB of ram and using the onboard video. After the OS was installed, the CPU usage is very high on idle. 

    Process Explorer shows that the high cpu usage is used by DPCs, System and SMSS. See here: 

    I used the xfperf tool from the Microsoft Performance Toolkit to find out what exactly is causing this. It found that its being caused by a few driver/system files: ACPI.sys being the mail culprit. This leads me to believe that it could be a driver issue. I started with the default drivers that the OS installed then tried the drivers on the ASRock website (they said Vista 64bit, not Win7) but they didn't make a difference. I also installed the the latest nforce drivers (15.49) with no change. I'm at a loss on how to troubleshoot this.

    Screenshots here and here

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  4. Anonymous
    2011-01-27T09:57:09+00:00

    Thanks, this fixed my issue djeffrey.

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