CPU Usage Gone Crazy!

[nyda]

About 4 months ago I bought a macbook pro 13inch with the i5 processor. Everything's been running smoothly until about 3 days ago when every things slowed down heaps. Safari, vlc, word, everything runs slowly and the computer lags and becomes inoperable for minutes at a time.

I checked the activity monitor and the CPU usage is literally hovering between 98%-100% constantly! 15% of this is system and the other 85% is user usage. I don't understand why when the processes listed only account for about 20% of CPU usage.

I haven't owned a mac before so if there is something blatantly obvious I am missing I apologise but I just can't seem to fix it at all, nor can I find any threads or posts on here or google with the same situation.

 

[Kaveman]

Probably a Printer or Scanner Driver,
If you click on the Column heading called CPU it will sort the out of control process to the top, you can force quit it from there.

You have done a standard Restart?

 

[nyda]

i don't have any printers or scanners connected to this computer, after going through the processes they literally only account for less than 20% of CPU usage at any one point (these are things like utorrent, safari and vlc). I don't know what is happening and it's annoying the hell out of me having my laptop to freeze for minutes at a time!

 

[Kaveman]

The other thing to check is in the spotlight icon, very top right corner of the screen, is there a small dot in the middle of the magnifying glass?

In Activity monitor choose All Processes and click on the CPU column header to sort them to the top/bottom. Something should be there otherwise it wouldn't read 98%.

 

[nyda]

ok i think you might be spot on there, massive help.

there is a dot in the magnifying glass. also in "all processes" there are two processes that keep jumping up in CPU%, MDworker and Antivirus. I'm not sure what MDworker is but I have a feeling shutting antivirus down might be a bad idea?

 

[nyda]

and it's also now saying that antivirus process is taking up to as much as 390%????? this is just confusing me! and does the dot in the magnifying glass have to do with anything?

 

[Kaveman]

And why do you have Antivirus? where did it come from? you know the number 1 trojan on the mac masquerades as Antivirus?

MDworker is making the Spotlight database 'metadata server worker', and I'm guessing its not getting finished because you put it to sleep or log out and when you come back it starts again.

You need to let that run overnight, no sleep, no log out.

 

[nyda]

i don't know what the antivirus is from, i have mackeeper? how do i find this "antivirus" program and get rid of it?

 

[Kaveman]

https://www.mac-help.com/t12146-mackeeper.html