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
    2011-08-11T20:44:52+00:00

    I have found something that has helped me 

    I compared my Vista machine with my windows 7 machine and found in the registry that windows 7 has a lot of  file tracing switched on in the registry key:

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mircosoft\Tracing...

    almost all of the entries under this branch of the registry had EnableFileTracing set to 1 but in vista they were all set to 0

    if you have a machine with slow disk access (like a laptop) this will take up a lot of time when logging lots of things and cause the cpu to keep swapping information whilst it waits to write things to log files.

    I keep looking as this has improved things but not fixed them totally, there must be some more logging that has been switched on

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  3. Anonymous
    2011-08-01T22:34:28+00:00

    Having had the same problem, and on opening Resource Monitor, I found that Apple Mobile Device Service was using 65% of CPU.

    I disabled it, then simply repaired the installation.

    So far, it appears to have improved.

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  4. Anonymous
    2011-07-28T08:05:55+00:00

    Another way you can pin point the problem (if you have Windows 7 64 bit)  is to go to 

    Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Performance Monitor. You will come up to a screen that says "overview of performance monitor" click on open resource monitor. Look under CPU. As you can see all the processes that are running your CPU are there along with what percentage its using up on the processor. Look at the process that has the highest numbers under the CPU category that is driving your CPU wild. I saw that my problem was the windows side bar that was running the CPU at 48% all the time. I highlighted and right clicked the process and picked  "suspend process". The CPU went down to 1% and problem solved.

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