If you’ve ever opened Task Manager to see what CPU, RAM or application consumption is taking up a lot of system resources, but you’ve seen the CPU suddenly increase by 100% and then drop. You may be wondering why there is a mysterious CPU spike in system resource usage. After all, Task Manager is a lightweight program you can run with little impact on system performance on most computers. In this post, AnonyViet will go with you to clarify this issue.
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CPU usage suddenly increased by 100% when opening Task Manager
The root of the problem lies in a fundamental misunderstanding of how Task Manager actually works.
When you launch Task Manager, it immediately starts collecting information about which processes are running, which processes are taking up the most system resources, and which ones are using. While Task Manager is collecting this information, the spike in CPU usage you see is that Task Manager is compiling that data. Once done, Task Manager shows all that data to you in a tabular format.
The confusion is even higher when you are monitoring CPU usage for different processes. The solution is to first open Task Manager so that it can start monitoring CPU usage as soon as it starts running, after about a few seconds waiting for the CPU to drop to a balanced level for a long time, you can evaluate the main computer resources are being used.
That said, you can also choose to slow down the Task Manager update rate to bypass this annoying problem. Since the update will be slow, the CPU usage spike will come later.
How to change the information update speed of Task Manager
Task Manager lists processes along with CPU, RAM, Disk, Network usage. It also lists performance, application history, startup mode with windows, etc. While there are so many, have you ever wondered how often the Task Manager is updated? Sometimes you may want to update faster and sometimes slower than usual to reduce the load on the CPU. AnonyViet will guide you how you can change the Windows Task Manager update speed.
To change the task manager’s data update rate in Windows 10:
- Open Task Manager with Ctrl + Shift + Esc.
- Open the Process tab
- Click the View menu item
- Select Update Speed
- Choose between High, Low, Normal and Paused
- High: This option will update the percentage every half a second. You can use it for resource-hungry processes like gaming and video rendering.
- Thường: Here, the update rate is once per second. This is the default setting.
- Low: If you need to monitor the percentage, but it changes too often, you can slow it down using this. It will update every four seconds. This gives you enough time if you want to take screenshots with slower updates.
- Paused: This will freeze everything in the list until you change it to other options. It is very useful when you need to take a screenshot.
So if you don’t want the CPU to increase suddenly, you can choose Low or Paused.
Task Manager provides a quick and easy way to see exactly what programs are running on your computer and how much CPU and RAM they are currently using. However, if you don’t like Task Manager, you can look at some Task Manager replacement tools that can help you monitor system resource usage such as:
- Process Explorer – I chose this because of it Kill Viruses and genuine Microsoft.
- Task Manager Deluxe
- Customized Task Manager.
- WinUtilities Process Security
- TaskInfo
- Daphne
- Microsoft Sysinternals Process Explorer
- System Explorer
- Glarysoft Security Process Explorer
- Process Hacker
- Starter Startup Manager
- AnVir Task Manager Free
AnonyViet hopes the post can explain why the CPU suddenly spikes when Task Manager is launched.
