Thursday, October 19, 2006

TIPS & TRICKS: 100% CPU and spoolsv.exe

As soon as your Windows XP machine boots up, you find that the CPU cycles (from Task Manager) reaches 100% and slows the machine to a crawl. Under Processes you see that the culprit is a service called spoolsv.exe. This process is a necessary process that helps send print jobs to a printer.

Before we say that this problem is due to a virus, take a look at all your print queues in Printers & Faxes. Look for any print jobs sitting in any of the queues that have errors in them. Delete those print jobs if you don't need them. These print jobs are the likely cause of the 100% CPU utilization.

Next make sure that none of the print queues are shared out on your computer. Usually, you can determine this by seeing if there is a hand under the printer icon. If there is a hand, right click on the printer icon and choose Sharing. Disable print sharing. This is necessary because this prevents other users on your local network from accidentally printing to the queues on your computer.

Finally, there is a possibility that the spoolsv.exe service could be harboring a virus. That's another tip. For now try this. Good luck.

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