100% CPU Usage on idle!!!

[Samihaddad]

This is my relatives cpu, and I was really cocky trying to fix it, like oh man, don't worry just gimmie a couple of hours and it's done, but the problem is more than I have expected. I tried every single antivirus until now, and non seem to detect it, OS: windows 7 home premium sp1 32bit. It seems that there is a rootkit somewhere, because the only processes that are running are windows one, and I've also checked the services, I'm really going insane! I've run rkill, it has nothing, mbam:nothing, mbar: nothing, tdsskiller: nothing... Send help please!!111!!1111!! Anyways, he said this is a new windows install, from windows vista to this, idk if it's upgraded or fresh installed, which might not be a rootkit but a compatibility issue from vista. It has sufficient ram and hardware to run it, it has an amd athlon and 4gb ram. also, something wierd when mbar scans is it displays 4 hdd partitions, one of them is partition (0) and is the primary and is bootable, the other three are not (1-3) and also (0-1) are NTFS and are BOTH primary (0x7) meanwhile the others are both empty but all the other (1-3) are not active. Also, partition (1) starts at LBA: 206848 Numsec = 488187904 partition (0) starts at LBA: 2048 Numsec = 204800. The others both start at 0 Numsec = 0 (referring to partitions 2-3) Thank you for the help and suggestions, any suggestion will be taken into consideration and action. Also the main service that was taking up usage was svchost.exe and when i shut it down it went down, but system idle took its place, please help.

 

[k1114]

Svchost is most likely windows update. There's a bug that may require a manual update. System idle is how much of the cpu that isn't used. You can see in the cpu tab that usage is the opposite of what system idle process shows.

 

[shmu26]

run windows update troubleshooter
google it from that windows 7 computer, and download from the official microsoft site, that way you get the right version, or pick it out manually from here
http/www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/windows_update_troubleshooter.html

 

[shmu26]

you could also install process lasso
https/bitsum.com/
it controls the background processes from hogging the cpu
and it will also help diagnose the problem

 

[James Mason]

The System Idle process "using" the CPU isn't actually using the CPU, it's just how the older OSs showed CPU down time.

Modern OSs don't have (7 and up) don't have the system idle process, they just show your CPU as 0% usage.

 

[k1114]

7 has it in processes which is the same as 8, 8.1 and 10 under details. Windows never changes.

 

[Samihaddad]

okay, ill try turning off windows update and try and see if that helps

 

[Samihaddad]

Svchost is most likely windows update. There's a bug that may require a manual update. System idle is how much of the cpu that isn't used. You can see in the cpu tab that usage is the opposite of what system idle process shows.

Thanks a lot! Your hypothesis turned out to be true, however; it was not the sole cause of the problem. I disabled several other things to get to where I am, and now I have a fairly good cpu usage (on idle 5-10% sometimes randomly spikes to 30%). I have disabled Windows Security Essentials, and I recommend you to do the same, if you have this problem. go to windows - run - type services.msc - and lookup microsoft antimalware, and basically turn it off, and turn off the windows update from there, and stop it from startup, it may get stuck but reboot if that happens, and it should not start again. I hope this helps, I thought it was a rootkit virus and downloaded all the anti rootkit programs to no avail, lol.

 

[k1114]

Weird that the antimalware was scanning something if you weren't doing anything but it is known to not be efficient. There are multiple svchost and even a single exe controls multiple other things which makes it complicated but you can see the usage in task manager so can follow the trail.