I have had my Dell XPS 13 for more than 2 years now and I am still very happy with it. When I bought it initially, it came with Windows 8. Later on I upgraded it to Windows 8.1. And lastly I upgraded it to Windows 10 – the free upgrade offered to many people. Windows 10 suits my computer well as it can be used both as a regular laptop and as a tablet (its screen can be flipped around). Moreover, there are a lot of performance optimizations and configuration improvements in this version of Windows that makes my life better. However, after the upgrade one problem occurred.

I noticed that once in a while a process called taskhostw.exe begins to use 20-50% of the CPU. After doing some research I found out this process is a wrapper for scheduled tasks on Windows 10. On Google you can find many issues related to this process, both on Windows 10 and previous versions of Windows (where it is called taskhost.exe). You could imagine that taking some much percentage of the CPU makes the machine work slower and the battery die faster. Furthermore, even if waiting some time for the process to finish its work, it never happened. Basically, the process was continuously running. The only way to stop it was to reboot the machine. More weird, the process itself was started at different points of time, i.e. it wasn’t after starting Windows or some particular program.

The first step to demystify the problem was to see what exactly is running. In the Task Manager you could see the following picture.

Sometimes the command line was just taskhostw.exe, while other times it was taskhostw.exe Time or taskhostw.exe Event. I even used tools like Process Explorer, but everything seemed alright. I then wrote a post on Microsoft’s platform, but unfortunately nothing worked for me.

Accidentally, I came across a similar post with the same problem. The person has noticed that this strange behavior occurs after restoring the computer from sleep mode. Then I realized that it was exactly the same in my situation. If I reboot the computer and keep it running, everything was fine. If I closed the lid (which makes the computer go to sleep mode) and then open it again, the process would hang again at some time. So I switched going to sleep mode to hibernate instead and since then I haven’t had any issues. I haven’t found out the real reason for the problem yet, so I would be glad if you share your findings. So far I am happy again with my laptop running Windows 10. 🙂