NT Kernel & System using 100% of CPU

Anonymous

Hi,

I just bought a new laptop with Window Vista Basic. The laptop has 3 Gb ram. I was just reading an article on line and then I start to hear the laptop fan running like crazy. then I went to the Resource Monitor and there was an image/program that was using 95% of my cpu and it was my system with description of "NT Kernel & System". It has been going on for over 30mins. Other than restarting the computer, what can I do about this "NT Kernel & System" eating up 95% of my CPU?

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Anonymous

I've been having the same problem on my HP desktop running Vista home for a couple weeks. I read that someone fixed the same problem by updating some hardware firmware, so I opened Resource Monitor and started unplugging all my hardware one at a time. The instant I unplugged my Belkin USB network adapter, NT Kernel & System dropped down to 0% and my computer unfroze entirely. The same adapter has been causing me a lot of grief for months- it wouldn't respond every time my computer came out of standby. I'll be updating the driver and firmware to see if that helps - otherwise that garbage is going in the trash. I recommend disabling/unplugging hardware (especially if you have any with odd behavior) until the problem stops, then replacing or updating that hardware.

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Anonymous

Hello Dtsai,

Thank you for posting. What you just described seems to be some form of mal-ware trying to mascuerade as a legitimate windows service. Windows does have NT Kernel and also System, but they never show up together as one service, program, or file.

I highly recommend that you use your favorite anti-virus and anti-spyware program and do a full scan of your PC.

Please try the scan and let me know if this helps you

Zack

Microsoft Answers Support Engineer

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59 additional answers

Anonymous

2011-03-24T06:02:21+00:00

I have been having horrible issues with my laptop lately. Games freeze or glitch. The computer runs slow and I often get blue screened. I know something is wrong so I was looking through my processes and noticed NT Kernel & System. I tried to open the file location to see what this process related too and nothing opened, I also tried to open properties and got nothing as well. Has anyone confirmed that this is any type of malware, spyware, or virus?
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Anonymous

2011-06-13T03:35:24+00:00

I have uninstalled and deleted the network drivers and restarted the machine. After restarted install the drivers back. Its seems to be OK for now.
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Anonymous

2011-07-05T14:17:03+00:00

I think that this is the most reasonable solution because I noticed the behavior after installing the update related to article KB2547666.

There is a sentence in the article that gives us a hint that the update will be painful:

"After you apply this update, Windows indexes the file system. This is a one-time operation and may take some time."

They don't say how much time it will take or how much resources indexing will hog. If they did, maybe no one would do this update.

You need this update if you want to make sure URLs over 425 characters will be deleted.

I wish they gave a better definition of "some time".
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