I noticed this weird happening with my laptop, Dell XPS 9520 (i9 12900HK), whenever I left it idling at the desktop I'd always come back to it with the fans spinning loudly.
I thought maybe I need new thermal paste, clean the fans or whatever. Then I noticed in the ThrottleStop tray icon my CPU usage was at 50%, so I open Task Manager and suddenly the usage drops to 3-4%, everything looks normal.
Could it be that the 50% spike was me opening Task Manager, could it be Windows being Windows, could it be my antivirus which just happens to stop at the exact time I open Task Manager?
No. This is reproducible every single time. I could be doing literally anything other than having Task Manager open and after exactly 10 minutes my CPU usage would spike and it would stay at 50% on the desktop for hours.
I tried Cyberpunk with Task Manager open my usage was 30%, without it open after 10 minutes my usage was at 80% exactly.
I ran Windows Defender and it didn't find it, how do I find the process?