If an errant process is using a large amount of CPU power, you can click the End Process button to kill the process. You can monitor the CPU usage for a few seconds to see what programs are consistently using the most CPU. Then click the 'CPU' header to sort the processes by CPU usage. In the Windows Task Manager window, click the Processes tab to view all running processes. To open the Task Manager, press Control+Alt+Delete and click the 'Task Manager' option. In Windows, you can use the Task Manager to see the current running processes. Both Windows and Macintosh systems provide easy ways to view the processes running on your machine.

In order to reduce your CPU usage, you first need to determine what programs or processes are taxing your CPU. If you computer is using close to 100% of the CPU, it will constantly have to free up processing power for different processes, which will slow your computer down.

This may happen if a program gets stuck in an infinite loop or encounters an unexpected error. However, some programs and system processes can use up a large amount of CPU without you even knowing it. Most applications will not use up more than 50% of your CPU for an extended period of time. Once the CPU intensive process completes, the CPU usage should once again drop down to lower level. When you open an application, play a video game, or encode media file, the CPU usage will rise or spike temporarily. In fact, many computers use less than 5% of their CPU the majority of the time. Answer: Most of the time, computers only use a small fraction of their CPU power.

How to view cpu usage