PC Support – Photoshop and CPU Usage

PC Support – Photoshop and CPU Usage

We recently helped out a photographer in Florida, USA who had a strange problem with his computer – after his computer had been on for a while the CPU was sitting on 20%. This made the computer slower, used power, made it louder because of the fans, and was just generally annoying. He’d asked for advice online but no-one had been able to help him fix it.

We took remote control of the computer to poke around and see what we could find. Using task manager we could see that the “NT Kernel and System” was taking the CPU time, which led us to the device manager to see what was going on in there. There was a USB device driver that was reporting problems – device drivers run close to the system so this could be the cause of the problem.

We made several recommendations to help fix this (the customer preferred recommendations to us doing the work):

  • Update all the device drivers on the system, especially the one reporting problems.
  • Boot the computer in safe and clean modes to see if the problem still occurs (this would give us further information to work from).
  • Disable the problematic device driver.

The customer tried our steps and in the end disabled the driver, which fixed the problem. We could’ve gone through and gotten it working but they weren’t concerned as the computer was working fine.

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