Microsoft Edge Tanking Performance

[Corndawg]

I was doing homework at home with my fiance when she started complaining at her laptop for being slow. I asked her if she wanted me to take a look at it and she showed me what was going on. She just had Google Chrome open with just three tabs doing homework as well.

 

The first thing I noticed was that it took a few seconds for the laptop to recognize any click or any action, the second thing I noticed was how high her fan speed was. I opened up her task manager and after a while it was able to pull up. Task Manager showed Windows Edge was running in the background with 97 sub-tasks within the application. It was taking up about 45% of her cpu and a large amount of her storage/ram. I after a few seconds we were able to highlight it and have the task ended. After it was ended I switched to the performance tab which took a little longer. When the screen loaded it showed a huge drop in ram and then a quick climb back to roughly 80% capacity. Went back to the processes tab and Windows Edge was back again. It looked like every time we tried to shut it down it opened right back up due to the amount of ram it was dropping when it was shut down and the amount it was taking up when it was running.

 

We decided to restart her computer normally. It restarted just fine and when she logged in Google Chrome came up with her tabs but there was a 4th one opened, a Windows help page. This is the link to the web page it pulled up https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hub/4338813/windows-help?us=windows-10&os=windows-10  I have never seen Microsoft Edge do this before and was confused why it was taking up so much cpu and ram. The web page it pulled up made me think Microsoft was updating Windows through Edge. If anyone knows what's up it would be appreciated because apparently this happens often for her computer. Thanks!

[KarathKasun]

Paragraphs please?

 

Also, seems like some kind of virus or malware.  Windows update does not use the browser.

 

[Corndawg]

Yeah, I think we might try a free trial of virus scanner for her laptop but nothing else seemed to point at a virus or malware, she's never opened Edge before which makes me confused even more