Tag Archives: Rundll32.exe

Rundll32.exe Using High CPU on Windows 8.1

I use a Lenovo T440s laptop for my service calls and when I need to do work remotely. My laptop runs Windows 8.1 Professional. I love this laptop and it has proved to be tough as well as extremely fast. I noticed a couple weeks ago that my battery was going dead after about an hour of usage. I also noticed that my cooling fan in the laptop was running louder than normal. I decided to open Task Manger on my laptop to see what the issue was. I soon noticed that a process called rundll32.exe was using around 25 percent of my CPU. I killed the process and everything returned to normal.

Task Manager Windows 8.1 Rundll32.exe

A few days later, my battery was going dead very rapidly. My cooling fan was on almost constantly and was blowing warm air. I opened Task Manger and sure enough, rundll32.exe was using 25% of my CPU again. I killed the process and everything was fine. It wasn’t long and my laptop was doing the exact same thing as I described before. I decided it was time to get to the bottom of this issue. Here is how I troubleshot what program was using the rundll32.exe and in the process was killing my battery.

Step One: I downloaded Process Explorer. This is an excellent tool. It is similar to Task Manager but goes into way more depth on the processes and dlls that are running. I extracted the download and then ran Process Explorer as an administrator.

Step Two: One of the first things I noticed was rundll32.exe was using 23 percent of my CPU again. Continue reading