Windows 10 runtimebroker.exe with high CPU fix

Well, I haven’t posted for ages, but I though I would post about a really annoying “feature” of Windows 10 that was driving me up the wall.


My Windows 10 machine is now running with no extra CPU load and everything seems to be running normally.

I recently upgraded to Windows 10 from 8.1 and everything seemed to go smoothly… at first.

However once I had got over the initial Oooo moment…(in about 5 seconds) I realised some things were not right.

Firstly I could not click on the start button, well obviously I could click on it but nothing happened when I did.

After a bit of googling this was fixed by running the following command (which I found here) in Powershell

Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

The second issue was that the task bar would sometimes fail to show until I clicked somewhere on the screen, at which point explorer would appear to crash with a brief flash of the screen and then the task bar would appear, this bug seems to have been fixed by a recent update from Microsoft.

Now thirdly and most annoyingly I had a bug where about 15 minutes after power up Windows would start using about 10-15% of my processor. This is a Core i7-4770K Quad core running at 3.50GHz, so that’s quite a lot of grunt being used.

It was enough to bring the CPU fans on and was generally very annoying. Looking at the task manager the culprit seemed to be runtimebroker.exe and the Background Task Host process (amongst a few others)

After not much success following many suggestions on the internet from many others who were having the same issue I happened to be talking to a colleague about his experience with Windows 10 and he said that Microsoft had mucked up the catalogue for the release, basically meaning that the Windows 10 installation was corrupted and that running a simple command would fix it.I had a hunch that this might be the cause of mine (and many others problems)

Well sure enough as soon as I got home I tried running the following command in an Administrator command shell.

Search for cmd.exe, then right click and select run as administrator, then enter the following command and let it run (it will take a few minutes)

sfc /SCANNOW

…and that’s it… just let it run and it will repair your Windows 10 installation.

After finishing it reported that it had found and repaired errors in my Windows 10 installation.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>sfc /SCANNOW

Beginning system scan. This process will take some time.

Beginning verification phase of system scan.
Verification 100% complete.

Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files and successfully repaired
them. Details are included in the CBS.Log windir\Logs\CBS\CBS.log. For
example C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CBS.log. Note that logging is currently not
supported in offline servicing scenarios.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>

My Windows 10 machine is now running with no extra CPU load and everything seems to be running normally.

Apparently this installation issue is causing various problems for many people upgrading to Windows 10 as the installation is basically corrupt and needs fixing. Fortunately there is an easy way to do that

Thanks to Paul Phillips for the tip.

Uttoxeter Flame Off 2014

Ha ha… OK so I don’t post very often, I really must set myself a target of posting some things up more regulally.

Anyway it’s now been two years since we last went to a Flame off having missed last year’s at Silverstone due Sarah exhibiting at the Big Bead Show.

Below are 151 new pictures from this year’s Flame Off that I took over the two days we were there, as before this annual event is organised by Tuffnell Glass and Totally Beads, and thanks to them for putting on another fantastic event, this year however the event was moved to Uttoxeter Racecourse.

If you haven’t been Flame Off is a great opportunity to meet like minded people, and have a darn good time…

As always if you would like to use any of my pictures please ask first.

Towcester Flame Off 2012

I can’t believe it’s been a year since I posted… Oh well.

Below are 208 of the 956 pictures that I took during the flame off weekend, as before this annual event organised by Tuffnell Glass and Totally Beads is held at Towcester racecourse in the Midlands. It’s a great opportunity to meet like minded people, and have a darn good time…

If you would like to use any of the pictures please ask first.

Towcester Flame Off 2011

I only visited the 2011 Flame Off this year on the Saturday, but still managed to take 556 pictures.

Below are a selection of those pictures that I took during the day

This annual event organised by Tuffnell Glass and Totally Beads is held at Towcester racecourse in the Midlands. It’s a great opportunity to meet like minded people, have a curry, and a darn good time… roll on next year!

If you would like to use any of the pictures please ask first.

Flame Off 2011

All over again

Well hopefully this post will not reside on my blog like a bad smell. (the last Journal post was there for 2 and a half years, all on its lonesome) So anyway We have finally completed the 2009 Journal… a bit late I know, but life got in the way (these things happen)

We just have to wait for the printers (M R Printers of Horsham) to run off the 300 or so copies that we need, so I can then post off the members’ copies to them.

It’s been an “interesting” experience, but one that I have enjoyed. I really quite like playing around with design tools. There are so many ways you can do it, and you could spend years tweeking things trying to get them just right, but at the end of the day you need to stop and hand the darn thing over.

Well… I don’t think I will be doing next year’s but I do hope you all enjoy looking at this edition… Happy reading.

GBUK Journal 2009

After rather a long time in the blogging wilderness I though I ought to update everyone on the state of the 2009 GBUK Journal.

Well all the pictures were in during December 2009 and I started on the main layout… All was going well, then Christmas hit! and January was a complete washout from an ability to work on the Journal point of view (for various reasons). So the upshot is, I have just started working on it again.

There is probably about 3-4 days more work to do, and then it can be handed over to the printers. Woo hoo

To whet your appetite, this edition has 80 (yes eight zero) artists’ work this time with some 230 pictures of beads and will be a 52 page A4 book. Please bear with me on this, but you will get your copies, they will be mailed out to you all as soon as I get them back from the printers.

Stay tuned !!

Rather useful photo search

I have just found something while having browse about, and thought it was worthy of my first blog post in a long time.

Have you every tried in vain to find a photo that matches your new layout theme… or just needed to find a picture in a particular colour?

Well now you can with Yotophoto

Yotophoto is the first internet search engine for finding free-to-use photographs and images.

To use the colour search just type in a hex colour value into the advanced search page and voilà…

So for example, to match the colour of my company’s logo… a delightful shade of orange, I can search for #FF6600

I can think of some really good uses for this, plus the images are all royalty free…even better.