Windows 10: CPU usage when PC is idle

This is not an issue but more a curiosity. I have the old Windows cup / ram monitor running as a gadget on Windows 10. When the PC is idle for a few minutes I notice the cup usage always spikes to around 10-13% and stays around that mark. As soon as I touch mouse and move it it then plummets to 0 or 1%. Is this normal? I wonder what it could be doing. It's not as if I can use task manager to see because as soon as I move the mouse or go to use the PC the usage returns to 0 or 1? I presume Windows is doing housekeeping stuff and it's a non issue?

cheers, Wayne

:)

 

CPU Usage 100%

PC starts with 100% cpu usage. It won't come down even cpu is left idle. Cpu fan won't stop, when temp are normal.

 

Windows 10 100% Disk Problem on Task Manager

"However I believe 100% disk usage on task manager is not normal. "

It's definitely not normal. When your system is idle (not working on anything), the CPU usage should be 1% or less.

Now sometimes there is background work that happens -- there's thousands of things the computer does on-schedule. So sometimes it's not going to be completely idle. I explain what those things are in my post about High CPU Usage in Windows 10:
PSA: Windows 10 High CPU Usage

But outside of those things (or when those things are done working), the CPU should go back down. If not, that page will show you how to tell what background process is hogging the CPU and

 

Ok, I left task manager open and waited for a few mins in front of computer not touching anything. The service that starts up is system and compressed memory. It's always about 13% and seems constant when machine isn't in use. Like I say, as soon as I touch the mouse and move it the service reduces to 0. The actual memory amount this service consumes is only about 50 mb.

UPDATE - so I left it idle quite a while, about 20-25 minutes. Long enough for my screensaver to kick in. Of course when I touched the mouse to resume desktop cpu usage was at 0. What was interesting is I looked at c: drive (SSD) which had consistently been 247 Gb free but it had risen to 252 gb. And when I left the machine idle again for about ten mins the cpu usage stayed at 0. So maybe whatever the system was doing got enough idle time to finish. It'll be interesting to see after shutdown tonight whether this cpu usage rises again when I switch on again tomorrow - am hoping not. I guess it's similar to what I saw on Windows 7 (still faithfully on my older laptop) where I would notice the available free space, on occasions, fluctuate (mainly rising) after a decent amount of idle time. I'm not one to leave my machine on for prolonged periods when not using it and as the Windows 10 desktop is newish and I'm almost always doing stuff/installing stuff at the moment to bring it to similar functionality to my other laptop (mainly games) it gets very little idle time for more than a few minutes at most. So I wonder if this process also has something to do with disk space clean up too. For what it's worth fast startup is enabled on my machine (it was on by default - boy is startup fast!), I doubt it's relevant to this but maybe worth mentioning .

 

Might be swap file adjustments that are causing the change in your SSD storage. Try setting max and min for swap file at the same size and this fluctuation should disappear. The system and compressed memory is generally always active and its level of percentage CPU and memory usage is possibly linked to your CPU speed and physically installed memory.

 

Hi, you might like to have a look at this thread:
Solved Is this normal? System and compressed memory process ALWAYS at 20% cpu - Windows 10 Forums

 

I rebooted earlier and the cpu usage did not spike to 13% after leaving alone for about twenty mins so I guess whatever that service needed to do was finally given time to finish. I'll be keeping an eye on this but it seems all is well