CPU usage 100% percent means that one or more programs are putting an unusual load on your computer’s central processing unit.
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There are a number of reasons that would occur, you first need to check the task manager to see which program is putting that extra load on your computer, sometimes when a program fails to exit properly, it looks like it’s been closed, but in reality it’s still using the processor in the background.
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To open the task manager:
1. Press ALT+CTRL+DELETE
2. Click “Start Task Manager”
3. Choose “Processes”
4. Click “CPU”
You’ll be presented with a list of all the processes currently running on your system, sorted by CPU power consumption.
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A process is just a unit of execution, it can be a program or a sub-program. The CPU power is shared among all the running processes, so if one particular process is consuming a significant amount of CPU power, it will affect all the other processes.
Look for the ones at the top, you should be able to see one or two processes that are taking too much CPU power. Now you can choose to end the process that is causing the problem, but if you don’t know which program it belongs to, I wouldn’t recommend that you do that, since it could be an important process that you need running all the time.
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So get the process name (under Image Name) and google it, find out more about it, which program it belongs to, whether it’s safe to end it, etc..
Also keep in mind that some processes cannot be ended, these are system processes that need to be always running, and you won’t be allowed to end them, windows will tell you if this is the case.
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Another thing you should consider doing is to run an anti-virus tool, such as Norton, many viruses lurk in the background, consuming an enormous amount of CPU power, they also tend to hide themselves in special directories and appear like system files to escape recognition, so it’s hard to detect them using the task manager alone, an anti-virus tool should be able to detect and remove these types of viruses.
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The third most common cause for CPU usage 100% percent is a broken registry, the registry is a constantly updated database that maintains different configurations related to your operating system as well as other installed programs, now I’m not going to go through all the technical details of how to manually clean up the registry since it’s beyond the scope of this article.
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If you just want something that can diagnose as well as fix these sorts of problems and don’t care about all the technical details, then try RegEasy, it comes with a free scanner and can actually tell you what is going wrong with your system. You can check it out here.
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