Question HP Pavilion G6 ~100% CPU busy.

[adrianxw]

My wife has a small laptop, the HP Pavilion G6 I mention in the title. She uses the thing for mail, a little social media and various handiwork sites, (she is a handiwork teacher - junior school level right now). It runs under Windows 10. It is how it runs that my question revolves around. Using the task manager, I can see that the CPU is running at or very near100% busy all the time, it is the fan that drew my attention to this, I am in another room and can still hear the thing. There are A LOT of things in the task list, but few are using any CPU, yet it says 100%, and nothing there looks obviously wrong. What is this thing doing? I am starting to worry that she has picked up some undesirable hidden stuff that is pumping out spam or worse.

 

[ubuysa]

Click on the CPU column header in Task Manager, to sort on that column, then post a screenshot.

 

[adrianxw]

I will try to do this in the morning after she has gone to work.

 

[adrianxw]

This is strange. When she started her machine up this morning, the fan noise was not there. I doubt she noticed, but I did. After she left for work, I had a general poke around and the CPU is basically idling today, showing less than 10% busy...

 

[ubuysa]

That would suggest it's not an inherent problem but some app your wife runs? Next time it happens repeat the Task Manager test.

 

[Ralston18]

And I will add the suggestion to also use Resource Monitor and Process Explorer (Microsoft, free) to learn more about what the laptop is doing or trying to do when the fan is noisy and CPU is at 100% busy.

FYI:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer