How to improve laptop performance in games by ending background processes safely?

Question

I own an ASUS ROG Zephyrus M15 gaming laptop that's about 3 and a half years old. It has an I7-10750H processor and a Geforce RTX 2070 Max-Q GPU. I recently upgraded to Windows 11 from Windows 10 and have noticed a very significant performance downturn since I play FPS games. Everything from frames to latency to ping has gotten significantly worse, and when I open task manager, I always see a plethora of .exe files running under the SYSTEM category that I have no idea what they do. Worse even, there are always an insane number of duplicates of any task that I open and all background tasks, like having 48 different instances of svchost.exe running at the same time. I see a huge disparity from the performance I see and feel in diagnostic metrics and what is accounted for in Task Manager. However, some tasks say I don't have access or permission to end them even when I run Task Manager as an Administrator. I'm the only user of the computer, and there has never been another. Is there a diagnostic tool you recommend, a step I can take to increase performance, or should I simply factory reset the laptop, reinstall everything, and hope for the best? Any help is appreciated and I can provide additional information if needed.

Answer 1

Hi Toby,

There is a lot to unpack here.

Let me start with

1."I always see a plethora of .exe files running under the SYSTEM category that I have no idea what they do"

and

2."there are always an insane number of duplicates of any task that I open"

And

3."like having 48 different instances of svchost.exe running at the same time"

This is normal for modern windows.

1.Generally, the .exe files you see running are components of windows which are not running as a service or services which are not running under svchost. This can be anything from Microsoft components such as LSASS.exe (which is part of the Micorsoft security and authentication subsystem) to hardware and thridparty services and applications.

2.A lot of software will spawn multiple instances of an exe when launched. Take chrome (or MSedge) as an example I have 2 windows open (one in incognito mode) and I have 15 instances of chrome.exe in task manager (I do have a number of tabs in each).

3.SVChost.exe is an application that is used to launch many windows services. Microsoft determines which services run under which service host or by themselves.

In short, I wouldn't kill any of these without investigation and understanding of what they are and what might break; and, ideally if there is something you do not need then uninstall the app/feature you don't need or stop and disable the service 'nicely' rather than killing anything from taskmanager. But understand what you are removing or disabling before you do it. Otherwise you may end up with an unusable system...

So your problem is performance. Let's focus on that.

When you have the issue, start with task manager. Use the performance tab/view. Is there high (over 80%) CPU, GPU, Disk, Network, etc. when the problem occurs.

Additionally, have you checked the Asus website for new/updated Drivers/BIOS/Firware updates specifically for windows 11? If not, then, do so.

Start with that and see how you go.