Task Manager is a pretty convenient tool. You should open Task Manager, either via the Windows Search bar or by using the Ctrl + Shift + Esc shortcut. In most cases, if you’re experiencing high CPU usage while no resource-heavy applications are running, it’s due to background processes. However, if you’re experiencing high CPU usage while staring at your home screen without any applications running, there may be something sapping your CPU’s resources in the background without you noticing.

These activities are computationally demanding, and your processor has to work hard to complete them in a timely manner. High CPU usage is really only a problem when it occurs when you aren’t actively doing anything particularly resource-intensive.įor example, while gaming, tackling professional workloads such as video editing or rendering, running an Antivirus scan, or packing and unpacking files, having high CPU usage is completely normal.

A high CPU usage environment could be gaming, where you can expect more than 50% of your processor’s resources to be utilized if you’re playing demanding triple-A titles. What constitutes “high” CPU usage is rather subjective, but generally speaking, a CPU operating at 10 to 20% usage can be considered idle.

It’s a pretty simple concept on the surface, but we dive into the more technical aspects of this metric in our dedicated article on CPU usage. In this article, we find out what causes high CPU usage and go over fixes.ĬPU usage is a percentage measure of how much of your processor is being utilized at any given time. CPU usage abnormally high in task manager? You would expect high usage during gaming, but if your CPU’s resources are being utilized while you aren’t doing anything particularly intensive on your system, you may have a problem.

Windows 10 monitor cpu usage