Windows 10 has been pretty stable for me, but within the last 2-3 weeks I have noticed that under some very specific conditions (which I have not identified yet), the Antimalware Service Executable seems to go haywire and lock up CPU for about 10 minutes before it releases the process back to the computer.
During this lock up time, the system never freezes but is barely usable. My rig is an i9-9900K with 16GB of RAM so I'm usually nowhere near max hardware utilization.
My guess is this was brought on by a recent Windows Update but I am not sure which one.
Windows 10 - Antimalware Executable pegs CPU usage for 5-10mins
- Thread starter SZR48207
- Start date
stop the service and disable it from starting and see if there are any ill effects?
Is defender enabled?
Originally Posted by JustinH
stop the service and disable it from starting and see if there are any ill effects?
Is defender enabled?
Try updating it, or disable it. There's no magic button that fixes this, though if it wasn't an update to MS Essentials and instead to Windows OS files, you could try rolling those back, all that happened in the last ~3 weeks you state is the period of onset.
Frankly that would drive me nuts, having a system subject to updating itself and breaking. The better long term strategy is disable updates and do it manually in a bunch after making an OS partition backup, or be constantly making backups, often enough that you can stand to lose whatever changed since the last backup then nuke the OS installation from orbit and install the backup when something goes wrong.