November 28

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IE7 – High CPU Usage and slow response under vista

By Christopher Mendla

November 28, 2008


Last Updated on December 3, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla

I have been noticing a gradual deterioration of web browsing performance on my laptop. It was getting to the point where using ie7 was getting counterproductive.

I noticed that the Windows Task Manager was showing IE7 using about 50 percent or more of the CPU, peaking at near 100 percent. Loading some pages I visit regularly would result in very choppy scrolling. I would also find that typing things into the pages was getting slow.

There were a number of forums where this issue was being discussed. The IE7 Phishing filter is supposed to be one of the main culprits but it was disabled on my installation.

Just to test things, I closed IE7 and did some browsing in Firefox. Firefox hardly used any CPU at all. One thing to note is that I don’t have a lot of add ons in FF.

I found that there is an option to start IE7 with no add ons. In Vista, I just did a START and put INTERNET EXPLORER in the search box. That showed the Internet Explorer (no Add ons) icon.

When I ran with no add ons, I found that the CPU usage was a fraction of what it was with functioning add ons. The pages were loading much, much faster.

So, the problem was in the add ons. I went into the TOOLS, MANAGE ADD ONS option of IE7. If you look at the currently loaded add ons, you will see which add ons are active. What I did was to start disabling the add ons that I didn’t really need. For example, do you really need the Google and Yahoo toolbars? After I disabled about half of the add ons, I tried IE again and , guess what, the cpu usage is staying low and browsing is much faster.

If your IE7 is getting slower, you might want to check your add on situation.

Christopher Mendla

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