Author: quantumgravitySubject: Need help with Ntoskrnl thread causing high CPU
Posted: 03 October 2016 at 9:57pm
MagicAndre1981,
Thanks for looking at this. That's a real service and you should be paid to do it. I've been trying to learn how to use the Windows Performance Analyzer, and so far I'm like a blind mole rat nosing around in there.
Before I saw your post, I was about to write that the problem had stopped this last weekend. I received a message from the Prey Project (which finds your PC if it's lost or stolen) that it hadn't seen my PC in about a month. It warned that my copy of Windows might have overwritten or otherwise disabled the Prey agent on the PC. That month corresponded with the period of much-heightened CPU activity on the machine since the Windows anniversary update. After I re-installed the Prey agent, everything was fine again. But I wasn't sure Prey was why. The PC went from a consistent 22% usage of the CPU down to its usual 4% in normal activity. The fan noise stopped. That's circumstantial evidence, but I thought I'd report it.
But your analysis of the trace indeed shows Prey as part of the problem. I'm almost shocked at the correspondence. Thank you!
Another tidbit in case it helps someone else is that node.exe did not show up in a significant way, so far as I know, in task manager. But many processes were taking far more CPU time than usual, including Norton Security, "System" (aka ntoskrnl.exe), and even Firefox. It made it tough to see what was going on ... everything seemed more resource-intensive.
It's nice to have a quiet, less stressed PC. Thanks Magic.
quantumgravity wrote:
