Windows 10: CPU Usage at solid 100% and brightness issue

About a couple months ago I did an in place upgrade to fix a couple of issues I had with Windows 10 and ever since then my CPU usage was always at 100% and when I click the batter tray icon the brightness button no longer says 100%, instead it just says 0% and it's grayed out and I can't click on it. My battery is draining a little fast not because it's defective but because of whatever is using my CPU, even when I turn on battery saver mode it doesn't help. And I tried booting into safe mode to see if the CPU usage would still be at 100% and it only goes down to 99%. I did another in place upgrade afterwards and it still didn't fix it.








:)

 

CPU Usage at solid 100% and brightness issue

I have let it record for 4 minutes and the Buffer has always stayed at 21 and when I look at the CPU usage on ProcessExplorer, it tells me at it is either down to 30%, 21%, or 19% instead of 100% like Task Manager.

 

CPU Usage at solid 100% and brightness issue

In order to diagnose your problem we need to run Windows performance toolkit the instructions for which can be found in
this wiki

If you have any questions feel free to ask



Please run the trace when you are experiencing the problem

 

Hi.
Did the system come with W10 or was it upgraded from W7/W8?
Just a few suggestions here:
- uninstall Kaspersky and use Defender for now.
- uninstall any unnecessary Dell bloatware
- turn off fast startup
- run Malwarebytes Antimalware Free to make sure it's virus free
- open Task Manager, go to the Details tab, right click on the column headings and choose Select Columns: check I/O reads, I/O writes and I/O other. Sort by each column and have a look at what's listed as highest. Google the name to identify.
- use Process Explorer to further identify the problem(s)
- perform a clean boot, and see if the issue resolves. If so, add things back in 2 or 3 at a time, to identify the culprit.













Hope that helps.

 

I'v ran many scans with Kaspersky and malwarebytes and Spybot and even Windows Defender and I'm pretty sure it's not virus related. Also I did forget to mention in the setting app, can't remember where in the settings because I don't have my laptop with me right now and I'm using my iPhone but in the settings app where you could change the brightness from there, there is no brightness slider to change the brighness. I haven't tried clean boot yet but I will. I'm thinking it might possibly be an issue with Windows. But I'll try clean boot and proccess explorer.

Also the laptop came preinstalled with Windows 8.1 and I upgraded to Windows 10. Had the computer for a year now.

 

Please post screenshots of your task manager, organised by highest CPU use topmost, and highest disk use topmost.

At present we have no idea what is using your CPU time... thanks!

 

Also run Msinfo32, Hardware Resources, Conflicts and Sharing, and Device Manager and post the screenshot of each - looking for hardware warnings and IRQ conflicts due to driver problems

 

I did a clean boot but it was still at 100%, and I have not tried turning off fast startup yet and looking at I/O information yet but when I was trying to I just noticed something here, I don't fully understand process explorer so I don't if it's showing about something else here or if it works like task manager but I thought I would post about this anyway just in case but look at what process explorer is telling me here on non clean boot.





I will post back once I have the I/O information and tested out fast startup.

 

Interesting. Okay. Curious to see what you find.

 

Odd set of symptoms so far.

Product Support | Dell US


lists your drivers etc for W10 x64. There's a BIOS update dated July 2015.

 

I had similar problems with OEM bloatware. Is that all uninstalled now?

 

Yep. Still didn't work. I even did a BIOS update like dalchina said and still didn't fix it. I tried taking off Kaspersky but that didn't fix it either. I reinstalled it though I because I don't like Windows Defender.

 

Sorry to not respond for about a week but I never got a chance to look at everything but this morning I noticed this on the lock screen. It was never there before.

I don't know if you can see it but it is the brightness icon with an exclamation mark on it.

 

Please have a look in Device Manager and identify (and post here) what your graphics is (i.e. Intel HD 4000?). Try highlighting it, right-click and select update drive>search automatically for updated driver software.

 

I've already tried that. They are up to date.