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Annoying System Idle Process Too High...SP4 Drivers a Possible Solution?

Px455

New Member
So I would say 1 in every 5 or so boots the System Idle Process & System eats about 30% of the CPU's available resources...if I do not restart, the fans ramp up, the battery consumption increases 3-fold, and the speed of use is slower. This is not an issue with my machine or my software...it is far too common for this. I'm currently using an i5 SP3 with SP4 typecover and stylus. I'm on the current Win10 build...1511 IIRC.

I've done everything to fix this, including,
hard 2-button reset, SFC, DISM, SFCfix, CCleaner, registry restore, driver update, system reset, fresh install from a .wim, fresh install with a .iso via burned DVD, disabling certain functions such as SuperFetch, Runtime, Flash, Windows Update, enabling the high-performance power plan. I've done even more but cannot recall it off hand...

I have a Typecover and Pen for the SP4. For a while, Microsoft kept telling SP3 owners that they CAN NOT customize the buttons on the SP4 pen when used with a SP3 using the Surface App. I later found out this is wrong...all you have to do is manually install the SP4 pen driver on your SP3, and then the Surface App will allow you to customize the pen functions. Even after doing this, I was told this is not possible. But it is.

At this point, I am 99% sure that this is a problem with a driver. One of my first steps was checking drivers for updates, but when searching online ONLY certain drivers for the SP3 are searched...in reality, individual organizations, such as Intel, has released UPDATED drivers for Windows 10. Still, the SP3 uses certain legacy drivers from the Windows 8 era. Microsoft themselves does not seem to understand the difference between their own drivers for the SP3 versus the SP4 which control the stylus and typecover. This only furthers my belief that this is a driver, and that an updated version of one of these drivers may fix this issue.

If you have ever installed a driver manually, you are aware that Windows 10 will automatically "update" the driver to whatever version it has been programmed to use. In reality, this can be a "downdate" because Windows 10 will overwrite a newer driver with an older one. So using Group Policy Editor, you will have to configure Windows to NOT update a certain component...the easiest way is to copy the hardware ID and paste it into an exclusionary update rule...this way you do not need to completely kill automatic updates.

So, this makes me think...if this issue has to do with Windows 10 and the SP3, and SP4 drivers made for Windows 10 may fix the issue. The problem is determining which driver is doing this is a long process of elimination, which I am still working to determine. Has anyone tried installing all of the SP4 drivers onto the SP3? These drivers were made specifically for Windows 10, where as most of the SP3 drivers came into play during 8.1.
 
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