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According to Task Manager the CPU Usage is 100% but when I click on the "Processes" and sort by CPU in descending order I see that the process using the most CPU is taskmgr.exe at 02%. All the others are at 00%. So what's eating up all my CPU cycles?

The CPU is a Intel Core 2 Solo CPU U3500 @ 1.40GHz. So it's not a spectacular CPU but still... the behavior I'm seeing still doesn't make any sense.

Also, Aero is disabled.

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Sorry, cannot yet comment. Windows update is know to sometimes cause 100% cpu usage. Click "show all processes" in taskmanager. If your notebook feels slow, see if svhost is at 100%, which would indicate Windows update is the fault. I think running it for a day or two fixed Windows update last time. If any other process is hang, try terminating it. If print spooler is at 100% restart the computer. If a virus is consuming all power, it may not show in the taskmanager.

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  • Yah - svchost was at 100% and I was trying to download updates. That does sound like the most likely culprit. I'll let it run for a few days, as per your suggestion. /fingers crossed/
    – neubert
    Jun 18, 2016 at 20:18
  • So this seems to have been the issue. I went ahead and disabled Automatic Updates on this computer. Maybe on a multi-core Windows Vista machine they might work better but not on a really out-of-date single-core machine. I also uninstalled Microsoft .NET. mscorsvw.exe was maxing the CPU out at 100% after the automatic updates were complete and for my purposes... I don't need it.
    – neubert
    Jun 19, 2016 at 15:46

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