[Windows 11] Strange CPU Spikes
Okay, so this has been bothering me for a while now and I simply don't know where this issue comes from.
A quick rundown on what's been happening to me: I bought a PC a while ago and I've been quite happy with it. Runs faster than my old one and I can play all the games I want on high settings. Life is great. But at some point, weird stutters started happening. They would worsen overtime. And whenever I install a Windows Update, the weird stutters go away for a while.
These stutters can be observed either randomly or by opening a mail in Thunderbird, by opening a game, a browser, literally anything. One day while gaming, it would randomly happen again and I decided to check my Task Manager to maybe find out what has been causing the CPU spikes (the stutters). So whenever this would happen, Service Host: Network Service would briefly sit at the top of the list with roughly 20-30% CPU usage before going down again. To be honest, this isn't much and it shouldn't cause, at times, 100% CPU usage for a few seconds, when outside of these spikes, I am sitting at around 30% CPU usage. This would bring the CPU usage up to 50-60% at most. I investigated "Service Host: Network Service" a bit further and it seems to be svchost -> DNS-Cache. I tried disabling it through the registry and half my programs stopped connecting, so I turned it back on.
Already tried sfc /scannow and while that did find corrupted files, it didn't solve the problem at hand. I also turned off Delivery Optimization, that didn't do anything either.
I don't know if my specs are important for this particular issue, but here goes:
AMD Ryzen 5 5600G (3.90 GHz)
48 GB DDR4 RAM
Nvidia Geforce 3060 Ti (8GB)
Windows 11 Home, Version 25H2
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Posted Jul 3, 2026, 6:23 PM UTC