System process on, when idling

For a while now, if I leave this laptop idling for a few minutes, the CPU light of it would start to flicker all of a sudden suggesting that a system process is about to start but when I move the mouse, it suddenly stops. It's getting really annoying now and I don't know what's up. Worse yet, it would happen the minute a screensaver comes on and sometimes it would continue to go on even when I get off from it, and of me having to go on Task Manager to see what's loading, and what I see are svchost and TrustedInstaller being active (and sometimes rundll and MakeCab). Stopping them is a bit of a pain in the backside also but this makes me wonder...

Is Windows Update trying to run here? I've already had it running the first time I have the laptop on so, why must it run again? It's really annoying and I wonder if there's a way to stop it if possible.

Comments

  • Have you tried stopping the Windows Update service? That could help narrow it down.

    I use a replacement Task Manager called Process Explorer from Sysinternals. In that, when I hover over svchost it will tell me which services are used by which svchost process, which often helps track down a runaway service.

  • If I stopped that, it could cause problems even of Windows Update to never scan for updates at all. For that thing you've mentioned, I'll have a look at it. Thank you.

  • You can always restart the service. It will restart itself if you restart the computer anyway. But since you said

    I've already had it running the first time I have the laptop on so, why must it run again?

    it sounds like you don't want it running again.

  • Exactly my point.

    Strangely, the same thing seems to happen on a WinXP VM I have and that's not even connected to the Internet, so...

  • That's usually either the indexing service or defrag. They like to run when you're not using the computer, so they don't slow you down.

    What about it bugs you? Noise?

    In Vista, it would run constantly no matter what you were doing. I think I disabled the Windows Search service to make that stop.

  • Nah, it just bugs me whenever it happens, 'cause I'm paranoid like that you know. I don't even recall it happening on my old computer either, which was also XP. Now knowing what's really happening when I just wanted to leave my laptop for a few minutes, is there a way to stop it or not?

    And yeah, Windows Search later become a massive inconvenience upon new updates handed to me, and I disabled it straight away.

  • To bump this, it's now happening more often upon me turning off the .NET Framework. Right after I did that one day, I saw svchost.exe trying to load something seven times in a row, usually in the space of every five minutes when idling. I'd like a way for this to stop completely because, there are times I need a short break from my system without needing to put it to sleep and now I can't because of this, and that I take short breaks quite often and have been for years.

    Although, doing a quick lookup on this gave me several things to do to solve the problem but I don't know which one. One mentioned about disabling all Windows services I should note.

  • Any messages in the event viewer?

  • Put a piece of tape over the light (which, btw, is for hard disk activity, not CPU).

    There are numerous background processes that run, especially when the system is idle. This is perfectly normal and there is nothing to be concerned about. Running process explorer is a good idea though just to check there's nothing malicious running, but honestly, it's not a problem.

  • @BlueSun said:
    Put a piece of tape over the light (which, btw, is for hard disk activity, not CPU)

    No offense but that is a bad idea to dispatch the Hard Disk Activity indicator, because should the computer be slow or otherwise frozen, you won't know if there was an important file transfer in the progress, meaning that you might have a change of damaging data or even making the computer unbootable.

  • A blinking light isn't really going to tell you much. There are so many things which access the disk and it doesn't always mean there's an important file transfer or that it's doing anything important.

    Besides which, you should have regular backups in place so that if something did get fubar'd all you have to do is restore from the latest backup and you're set.

  • @nick99nack said:
    Any messages in the event viewer?

    Nope, though I only used it recently regarding the "Winlogon" problem I had weeks back.

    @BlueSun said:
    There are numerous background processes that run, especially when the system is idle. This is perfectly normal and there is nothing to be concerned about. Running process explorer is a good idea though just to check there's nothing malicious running, but honestly, it's not a problem.

    Guess you can say I'm just making a mountain out of a molehill then... even of myself complaining about high RAM usage from a browser. Thanks for that.

  • I suggest you to leave opened Task Manager showing all users processes and see what happens. In case it's only svchost.exe running, it might be the programmed defrag thing or Windows installing updates. Just try selecting svchost and right-click in "Go to service". And try disabling one by one to see which one was the actual guilty

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