Windows Bites Again: CPU use

[gangrel]

CPU Use, with NOTHING going on, was running around 25-30% on my Win 10 system...fairly plain jane 4th gen i5, just the Intel graphics. Reasonably new hardware, tho; the box came with 8.1. No hardware should be so old as to give problems. 2 other boxes don't show this problem. This has probably been going on for some time, but not really noticed, as it's on a box I don't use as often.

No programs active...but still showing 25% CPU use. Resource Manager locates it down to netsvcs. UGH. Numerous suggested fixes that don't work. Got down to:

a) disable BITS -- background transfer. Sometimes goes haywire.
b) Windows Update...same thing. Sometimes gets stuck.

BITS stopped cleanly; the Windows update service didn't. Disabled it in services.msc; still showed "stopping" but NOT stopped. Fine; reboot. OK, that happened cleanly enough.

With both BITS and Win Update disabled...CPU use was back to normal. Huzzah for that, at least.

Flaky, flaky Windows.....

 

[Colif]

bits is tied to windows update, the second won't work without the first. Nor will store updates but that is not a great loss. It also uses it for driver updates so you on your own now.

expect something else to not work too as MS made turning auto update off almost impossible on Win 10 home. I wouldn't be surprised if it just turns it back on.