You don’t want to stop a process like explorer.exe (which manages many graphical elements like the desktop and Start menu) or winlogon.exe (startup tasks and the CTRL+ALT+DEL screen), unless you have a good reason. However, buggy or unexpected behavior - for example, one Windows process trying and retrying to perform a search action that has been disabled elsewhere - can sometimes cause a process to eat up nearly all of your system’s resources.Īfter you’ve opened Task Manager and found the process unexpectedly using up a chunk of your CPU, search online to identify it. When your PC is idle, all of these processes together will usually use less than 10% of your CPU capacity. These Windows processes are designed to use very little of your processing power or memory under ordinary circumstances - you’ll often see them using 0% or 1% in Task Manager. If you see a background process with a name like Runtime Broker, Windows Session Manager, or Cortana at the top of the CPU column when you hit 100% CPU usage, then you have an issue. These processor technologies can greatly increase the speed of multitasking and using demanding programs, but abnormal CPU usage situations can still arise. Intel® Core™ X-series processor family have another tool to help avoid slowdowns, as their Intel® Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 automatically assigns the biggest tasks to your fastest processor cores, as well as boosting the frequency of those cores. Intel® Turbo Boost Technology can also help processing of heavy workloads by dynamically increasing the frequency of your CPU. If the CPU usage of a heavy-duty program like Adobe Premiere is high, it may just be efficiently using the CPU cores available to it.

Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology (Intel® HT Technology) takes it a step further, creating multiple “threads” of execution in each core, each of which handles different processes. Modern CPUs handle multitasking situations by splitting processes between multiple processor cores, which work through different sets of instructions simultaneously. It’s important to remember that high CPU usage while multitasking can be normal. If you’re dealing with this kind of everyday high-CPU usage situation, you should close all background programs and tabs you aren’t using, then return to Task Manager and see if the situation has changed. You can expect high CPU utilization when playing some games, running a video-editing or streaming application, performing an antivirus scan, or juggling many browser tabs.

Intel processor diagnostic tool freezes