I am trying to optimize a user's laptop PC which has become very sluggish. It's a 10-year-old Dell Inspiron 1545 with a single-core Intel Celeron running at 2.2 GHz, with 3 GB RAM, running 64-bit Windows 10 with the latest updates (Fall Creators Update, 10.0.16299).
Although grossly under-powered by today's standards, it used to work just fine for the user's purposes (web browsing, email and word processing) when it was running Windows 7. It seems to have slowed down when Windows 10 was automatically installed and possibly continued slowing down ever since.
I've looked at existing questions on the Internet but none of the suggestions so far worked.
When the laptop is sitting there doing nothing, it's using 91% CPU. Memory usage is 50% (1.5 GB out of 3 GB). Disk activity is between 0 and 2%. It has a single C: drive with just 61 GB in use and 157 GB free. A full virus scan using paid-for AVG Internet Security shows no threats.
There are two processes using the bulk of the CPU, both svchost.exe:
- Service Host: Local Service (No Network) - 53% CPU, 4 services:
- Windows Defender Firewall
- Diagnostic Policy Service
- CoreMessaging
- Base Filtering Engine
- Service Host: Local System - 34% CPU, 17 services:
- Windows Push Notifications System Service, WMI, User Manager, Web Account Manager, Themes, Shell Hardware Detection, ICS, System Event Notification Service, Task Scheduler, Background Intelligent Transfer Service, et al.
The CPU usage remains the same at 91% even when I turn off wi-fi (so it's not related to Internet activity). It doesn't seem to be related to disk activity as that's very low (0 to 2%).
I've cleared all of the Event Logs to make sure the services weren't taking too much time writing to very big event logs (they weren't very big to start with anyway). Before doing that, I checked for any tell-tale signs in the event logs and didn't find anything important.
One post suggested that a problem with a device driver (StorAHCI.sys) can cause high CPU usage in svchost.exe. I've checked and this laptop is not using this driver, it's using iastor.sys.
Can you give me any further pointers to investigate the cause?
