My computer has stuttering issues. I'm monitoring my CPU Core Utility to see if I see anything weird. Am I on the right track?

[MrZoraman]

My CPU is an i7 6700k. "Old" but still plenty modern I would think. Sometimes my mouse stutters on the desktop and I figure no CPU made in the last 40 years has an excuse to stutter on the desktop like that. I also have random periods of massive stutters in some games I play.

 

I booted up HWiNFO64 and I'm provided two stats: Core Usage and Core Utility. I did a little bit of research and it sounds like Core Utility is more accurate, but its numbers are pretty different from usage so I'm guessing I just don't know what I'm looking at. If I watch a youtube video my core utility is 50% across all the cores, but CPU usage doesn't go above 5% on any of the cores, which is more along the lines of what I expect.

 

Whenever my CPU stutters nothing in the core utility indicates that all the threads are pegged at 100%, which is when I would expect to see the performance drops in games/moving my mouse on the desktop. GPU utilization never goes above ~20% either.

 

Maybe it happens when my RAM gets too full? I have 16GB of RAM and according to HWiNFO64 the max physical memory used I've reached is 14,316MB.

 

Maybe my CPU is just cursed? I used to overclock it back in the day so maybe I cooked it a little too hard...

 

Maybe it's because I'm running windows 11 on an unsupported CPU? I did the registry hack to install windows 11.

 

Thanks for any help/advice!

[johnno23]

sounds to me like it might be something as simple as cleaning the mouse.

check that there is no gunk trapped around the optical part. if by chance you are still using an antique roller balls mouse remove the bottom plate take out the ball wash gently with a little soapy water and clean the 3 tiny little rollers on the inside of the housing where the ball sits. just be extra careful cleaning those as they are quite delicate.

[MrZoraman]

8 minutes ago, johnno23 said:

sounds to me like it might be something as simple as cleaning the mouse.

check that there is no gunk trapped around the optical part. if by chance you are still using an antique roller balls mouse remove the bottom plate take out the ball wash gently with a little soapy water and clean the 3 tiny little rollers on the inside of the housing where the ball sits. just be extra careful cleaning those as they are quite delicate.

That's a good idea! It's an optical mouse and I haven't had any problems with my previous computer (I unplugged one computer that was working fine and plugged a new computer in, without moving/changing any of the monitors/peripherals). Upon picking up the mouse there is something rattling around inside it which is kind of spooky...

This mouse has been known to have problems with its sensor every once in a while, but when that happens the mouse stops going where I want it to. When my mouse stutters it eventually catches up to where I intended it to go, like the data temporarily got stuck somewhere between my mouse and me seeing the results. Also when my game stutters the entire thing stutters, not just the mouse, which leads me to believe it is not mouse related.

[porina]

Go to the main view in task manager, sort by high CPU usage and wait for the next stutter. See if something is taking up the CPU at that time. On one system I had, a corrupt install of of Intel DSA made it stutter at exactly one minute intervals, and that was eventually tracked down as the cause. I saw its CPU usage spike the same time as the system stuttered.

[johnno23]

I suppose the easiest method to check if it is the mouse or a software thing is to just plug in a different USB mouse if you have one or can borrow one for an hours or so.

if the issue goes away then assume time to buy new mouse. if it remains then need to troubleshoot possible software solutions as driver updates checking that not another USB  item is causing an interrupt or something ?

[MrZoraman]

Thanks everyone for your tips and suggestions! Upon further examination I think it's just my RAM filling up and my computer chugging to free up space every now and then. I guess I need more than 16GB of RAM nowadays...