Brand new Dell laptop - CPU at 100% on idle

[Aoewy]

Hello there,

I come here to seek some advice cause I ran out of ideas on how to fix that, if its fixable.

A short back story. My mom needed a laptop, nothing powerful, she plays this little solitaire cards game and she browse internet, so she got a Dell Inspiron 15 3000. It has an i3 @2.46ghz, 6gb ram, intel onboard graphic. Its not even 1 month old. She told me it was slow and couldnt read a cd or a dvd, so she called Dell. They sent a technician, well, they called a small tech company and paid the guy to go to my mom house and check the laptop. The technician, after looking at it, told her the cpu was running at 100%. He told her, and I vaguely quote, that the cpu is too shit to run a cd(the f?) and that she should return it and pay for something better. Now... I'm no tech professional, but Im fairly certain my old p3 500mhz that I have somewhere full of old dust could still run a freaking cd without being at 100% cpu usage... I know this cpu isnt a racing car, but today technology, this should be more than enough speed to browse the web and watch a movie..

So I checked the laptop myself, ran anti-malware, cleared the %temp%, did multiple of test.. its clean, no malware, no virus. Drivers are up to date, I did some manipulation that I found on different website, but still, the cpu is always high at idle and randomly spike.

Is it something some of you have knowledge about, is there any special fix (windows 10 fixes maybe) that could help, or should I just call dell again for her and tell them that it has to be a hardware problem and we want them to replace the laptop?

Thank for your time, sorry for my poor English

Aoe

[MrPaladinGuy]

Just to clarify, you never hit control + alt + delete, went to task manager, sorted by CPU usage and checked to see what was using it ?

The i3-5015U/5005U (Broadwell) certainly isn't fast, but it should still be able to run a browser and solitaire in W10.

[Aoewy]

Just to clarify, you never hit control + alt + delete, went to task manager, sorted by CPU usage and checked to see what was using it ?

The i3-5015U/5005U (Broadwell) certainly isn't fast, but it should still be able to run a browser and solitaire in W10.

Yes, like right now perfmon.exe is using between 10 and 20% by itself, WmiPrvSE.exe is at 0 then it did spike to 40%.. but its hard to tell cause its updating KB890830 at the moment.. ill wait for that update to end to see after..

[I Push Buttons]

Make sure to uninstall all the garbage that comes installed on it from the manufacturer (apart from the DVD software they include since it probably has the codec you need to watch DVDs on it)...

Also hit Ctrl Alt Del, open the task manager, and go over to "startup" and ensure everything you don't need is disabled on startup.

You said there are no viruses or anything, so those two things should help a lot.

The problem with low end laptops is they come with all the standard proprietary software from Dell, Acer, Asus, etc., factory installed... And then they have them all set to launch on startup... And you have this low end computer with a slow CPU (still more than enough for browsing the internet, watching movies, etc.) trying to boot up while also trying to launch all that bloatware and run it in the background, all while you are trying to do other stuff yourself on top of it.

Just get rid of that stuff or at the very least make sure it isn't trying to launch on startup.

[Aoewy]

Ok thank I'll try that

[TheDeeGee]

Probably a mining script from a website.

Use uBlock Origin.

[Denpepe]

It could simply be downloading a big windows update in the background, makes laptops crap themselves usually.

[Twoddle]

Gonna throw out a couple of suggestions. Try disabling the Windows Search and Superfetch services, these are supposed to improve performance over time. Problem is on low end laptops that time never comes and the system is always slow so just disable them. Windows Defender I find is also a resource hog on slow machines.

For further investigation Microsoft's Sysinternals Suite has a bunch of tools like Autoruns which shows every startup process under the sun, Process Explorer which is a souped up version of Task Manager and Process Monitor which displays a live filterable list of every operation the OS is doing. If you want to see what's going on in the background it'll show up here (it usually includes what I mentioned in the first paragraph).

And what @I-Push-Buttons said laptops come loaded with bloat, things like "Boot Optimiser" are trash. I'd even go so far as to get rid of the DvD software and download a free player. Actually no, what I would do if it were my own personal laptop is wipe it and reinstall a non manufacter version of the OS from scratch making sure I could put the correct drivers on afterwards but that option may not always be available.

Also touching on what @Denpepe said, I had to fix a laptop earlier this year that was stuck in an infinite loop installing Windows updates, it would never complete and every reboot the process would continue, slowing the computer down. In the end I had to manually seek out and install some prerequisite updates the computer wasn't finding.

[Aoewy]

Thank you all for your inputs, I note all that! Its been updating for 4hours now.. yes 4. Its the Windows 10 v 1709, i read on the internet that on some low end machine it was a long dwl. So I'm wondering if that thing was trying to install since all that time in the background slowing the entire machine.. So I'll just wait for it to completly finish updating, after that if its still doing it I'll do what you all suggested.

Thank again!

- - - Updated - - -

Just an update.. after spending all day updating the new version of Windows 10, I removed every dell apps from the laptop. Its been running at 10-15% on idle with some random 100% spike still. It definitly run better, but still cant read a cd.. when I put one in, the sound keep cutting off, and the cpu skyrock at 100. So I called Dell, they made me do this diagnostic in the bios.. everything was fine, so they told me that windows might be part of the problem, and asked me to re-install it.. So this is what I'm doing.