windows 7 high cpu usage STRANGE

I have windows 7, intel i3 core and im having a very weird problem.

My CPU will often jump to 80%-100% of cpu usage. It will run real hot, and it will run like this for more than a few minutes. It will also spike up and down within ahigh range(40-100%). The strange thing is that all processes contribute to the cpu usage. There is no one process that sticks out during this time. Even task manager begins to run at 20ish% while others like a browser runs at another 20% etc. At a base state(no applications running, that i can see) It will hover within 20%-40%. It happens inconsistently. Sometimes i can get away with watching videos, other times it hits me hard and slows my computer to a crawl.

Can anyone help?

 

That reads like the Windows kernel is having problems with something, set your TaskMan to show the kernel times - View > show kernel times. Try using LatencyMon to find out the cause of this.

 

I think i found a possible issue. I have switchable graphics, and i switched to the integrated graphics and have been running smooth for the past hour or two. I dont know why this would be causing such drastic problems as every thing on my computer is up to date. The only explanation for my case would be the discrete graphics card and the cpu together caused a lot of heat, which affected overall performance. If i run into any issues i will let you know. Hopefully this fixes the issue for people having similar problems.

 

Given that information, I'd guess that Windows was having problems with drivers related to the graphics card; starting with Vista, MSFT introduced a method that tries to restart the graphics card drivers should an error occur, it allows a certain amount of time for the drivers to reset (during which time Windows will become unresponsive or hang) then continues as normal. If it can't reset the driver within the allocated period, it crashes (as it used to with XP).

Try updating the drivers for your discrete card from the chip maker, AMD or nVidia probably.