[SOLVED] "System" Process High CPU Usage When Idle

[Prologh]

Hi,
I have a Lenovo Thinkbook with Windows 10 Pro installed running on Intel Core i7-10510U and 16 gigs or RAM with a 500 GB Samsung NVMe SSD disk. Despite this decent specs, my laptop likes to turn into a hair dryer when I left it unattended and idle for around five minutes. When I get back and do any action (move mouse, press a key) it stops and goes back to normal. The culprit seems to be the system process with thread called ntoskrnl.exe!SeAccessCheckWithHint+0x1c620 eating up a decent amount of CPU time as I inspected it in process explorer. Usually the system process sits around 25% of CPU usage.

Don't mind the process explorer usage, that's the monitoring program usage and it's fine. Without monitoring it is just the system process.

Yes, I did the usual stuff, like scf scan, disabled antivirus. It's not disk defragmenting. It's not windows update.

I've seen this topic (system-process-high-cpu-usage-when-idle), but I really don't care if windows does this to optimize my user experience, I just want it to stop.

Can anybody help me or guide me into further narrowing down the cause? Thanks.

 

[hotaru.hino]

If you want to dive deep into this: https://superuser.com/questions/527401/troubleshoot-high-cpu-usage-by-the-system-process

Otherwise, the "optimizing" Windows is doing is housekeeping chores. It'll stop once you actually start using the computer in some way.

 

[Prologh]

If you want to dive deep into this: https://superuser.com/questions/527401/troubleshoot-high-cpu-usage-by-the-system-process

Otherwise, the "optimizing" Windows is doing is housekeeping chores. It'll stop once you actually start using the computer in some way.

I can leave it for hours and it will not stop. It still does this after two years of using this laptop, so I hope you can see where from my doubts come that this is justified CPU usage. Also, other laptops with Windows 10 does not behave like that, so I suspect something is wrong with this particular one.

Thanks for the link. I guess I'll need a few free hours for a debugging session. Will give it a try.

 

[JohnBonhamsGhost]

normally this Windows process would be using less than 1% of resources during normal everyday use.
but it will spike while the OS is 'optimizing' or doing some sort of internal cleaning while the system is idle.

right-click on this process and choose to open file location.
if it is anywhere other than a System folder or named anything other than 'ntoskrnl' then it is some sort of malware running on your system disguised as a Windows process.

if that is not the case then it may be corruption within the OS and this process is struggling to do it's regular duty.

 

[Prologh]

I googled a bit about this whole ntoskrnl.exe!SeAccessCheckWithHint+0x1c620 and this super user answer came up.

I opened Task Scheduler, navigated to \Microsoft\Windows\MemoryDiagnostic\RunFullMemoryDiagnostic and disabled the RunFullMemoryDiagnostic completely. It did the trick. Now, my laptop is as silent as the grave.