System interrupts kills PC / eats up to 100% of CPU

If your computer is suddenly slowing down noticeable and you have just:

  • installed a new driver or added new piece of hardware,
  • installed or started using some new hardware-related service (i.e. Internet phone, conference software)

then check Task Manager to see, if System interrupts isn’t consuming most of / all of CPU power of your PC.

If you see something similar to this:

then you don’t have to look anymore. Nine of of then chances that this is a hardware-related issue.

In my case it was Zoom.us local conference client that wasn’t able to get together with my microphone’s driver. I would never believe that something as simply as Internet phone or conference software can actually kill my entire PC.

Note that the results that I have depicted above (nearly 100%) are rare. But, even if you have System interrupts anywhere above 10% or 20% then this is a good idea to start looking for a possible cause.

Windows 10’s drivers stack was written from scratch and really offers high quality performance even on older PCs (mine is nearly ten years old!). It should never be above just a few percents, if your drivers stack is running without problems.

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