Sunday, May 3, 2015

windows 7 - High CPU usage by dwm.exe when nothing is happening

Setup: Windows 7 Ultimate, running in a VMware box inside Windows 8, VMware Tools installed; VMware Workstation is the only application launched in win8). Aero is on.


Starting a few months ago, on and off, performance is extremely sluggish in all applications. Checking process explorer shows high CPU usage by dwm.exe (20-30%) and svchost.exe (30-40%) when system is idle, nothing open but Explorer.


Killing dwm.exe does not change anything; dwm resumes its high cpu usage when it restarts.


Services in svchost are:



  • Audio Endpoint Builder

  • CSC Service

  • Netman

  • PCASVC

  • SYSMAIN

  • TRKWKS

  • UXSMS

  • WDI System Host


Turning off Aero helps slightly, but I want to actually solve the problem. This problem didn't exist before; it wasn't sluggish, dwm.exe only had high usage when it was actually compositing windows together; I never noticed any high usage from that svchost.


edit when I'm running one app at a time, occasionally large areas of the app go black, like in the olden days with Win 95 when it would run out of system resources.

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