I opened task manager and saw that my CPU was pinned to 100 by avast. I turned it on this this morning and, noticed my Core i5 5200U CPU was unusable (On YouTube videos would randomly freeze and over 3/4 of the frames were being dropped). On my desktop gaming PC, which has plenty of cooling and a high-end CPU, I see temperatures varying around 50C when I’m not really doing anything demanding. Yesterday, I decided to install Avast on my computer. In general, anything between 40C and 65C (or 104F - 149F) is considered a safe heat range during a normal workload. They may be expensive but SSDs make a huge difference.Ĭhange the throttling level around until you have something that doesn’t slow your system down too much but also manages to run at least one scan a week. The CPU temp depends entirely on the CPU used. If your system has an SSD though, chances are you won’t notice Windows Defender running all that much. If you happen to have an HDD instead of an SSD, you will notice that your system slows down much too much when Windows Defender runs its scans. If you often think about disabling Windows Defender simply because it slows you system down too much, this is a far better alternative.Īs for why you should limit CPU usage for Windows Defender, the app tends to drag everything down. But don’t worry Here we have listed some of the easy-to-use troubleshooting steps to help you fix Avast’s high CPU usage quickly. It can be annoying as your PC starts lagging and becomes slow. It won’t impact how well Windows Defender can protect your system and it certainly won’t turn off the scans it runs when you download new files to your system. But too much CPU usage can be problematic in most cases for you.

This may have an impact on how much time it takes to run a full scan on your system. The throttling applies to when Windows Defender runs a full scan and will be applied when it tends to start running if your system is idle. All that does is disable throttling which means Windows Defender will use as much of your CPU as it wants. Step 2: Once the control panel opens, you will be able to see every setting in your system. If you are finding it hard to find the control panel, Press Windows + R, and search for the control panel. Step 1: Go to the control panel of the windows. You can increase the limit beyond 50% if you like but you cannot reduce it to 0. After fixing the program, you will be able to solve the Avast high CPU usage. Set-MpPreference -ScanAvgCPULoadFactor 50

Run the following command but replace the number at the end with how much CPU usage you want to allocate to Windows Defender. Decide how much CPU you want Windows Defender to be able to use. By default, Windows Defender can use up to 50% of the CPU. The CPU usage is set as a percentage of your CPU’s total processing power.

It only requires a little command to be run in PowerShell however, you will need admin rights to run it. Microsoft has a documented method that lets you limit Windows Defender CPU usage.

Avast taking too much cpu