High CPU usage caused by Malwarebytes

Malwarebyte is consuming almost 100% of my system cpu after Windows Update. It was working fine before. I am only using Malwarebyte as the default antivirus in the system. There was some issue with MSE, before which I removed. And it is now almost 4 months. Things look to be working fine here. I need some help here to fix the issue. When I start my pc which has Windows 7, the cpu usage goes to 100% suddenly after few minutes. I cannot do anything. Everything freezes on the desktop. How to stop this thing. I cannot even remove it, because the pc takes a long time to open Explorer.

Looks like your system has severe virus issue. Cpu usage is always caused by infections in your system. You will have to format your system. Try to take the data backup first and then go for the cleaning. Second thing it is always necessary to keep a good antivirus in your pc. There are ample of free edition.

Boot your system in safe mode first. You can do that by hitting F8 constantly on restart. When you are in Safe Mode then just test out the cpu usage. If it is low then it means there are some background services causing the issue. You will have to either remove them or disable them. Download and install Hijackthis in your pc. This tool will give you complete information on all the applications working in your system. You will need to find the location and get rid of them one by one. You can go in Control Panel and first remove Malwarebytes. But I do not think that will be safer. Try to install a good free antivirus. There are many like AVG, Avira, AVAST, etc. Even popular antivirus like Norton, Kaspersky, ESET, offers yo ua 30 day free trail with full features. So you can just download one of them, update them and then run a full system scan in safe mode itself. This will save your system and files also. It will be wise to backup data first. Because if none of this works, then you have to anyhow format your pc and install windows back from scratch. So better copy your important files and then move ahead with other stuff.

I always use a bootable live disc to backup my data. Ample of time the system just stops working. You cannot do anything on that. The only way to safely move files from your system avoiding virus is via a bootable live disc. Like Ubuntu.

I had landed in the same kind of issue. I was using AVG free edition here. I do not understand even after having a antivirus in the system, how does this virus spread so widely. First there were some popups about virus. There were some basic warnings only. I ran a full system scan and it looks to be cleaned. Later on I got constant popups. I am actually using different SD card on my system. I have a photo studio. So I get ample of photos in memory cards and so comes the virus also. But I think AVG will be enough to deal with them. Later on my system started getting slower and slower. When I check the performance the cpu usage was 100%. I am using Photoshop regularly and due to high system usage, it takes really long time to finish my work. I stucked with this thing. Thanks for that LiveCD suggestion. It worked. I copied around 20GB of photos to my external drive safely and formatted my system. Later on I bought Eset. It is nice antivirus which is low on system resources. It work well with Malwarebyte. I hope this would last longer. I was also using a single antivirus like you. This time I added Eset separately.

Malwarebyte is great for cleaning malware. It is not a complete antivirus I think. There are many threats that can enter your system through different ways.. Like via internet, removable storage, etc. So keeping a full internet security pack is quiet necessary and it is also cheaper.

Antivirus only consume high cpu when it is scanning. In your case I think Malwarebyte is running a scan in the background. If you think Malwarebyte is responsible for high system usage, then through task manager you can end its process for sometime. Go in safe mode first and run a full system scan. It might takes hours to complete. The second thing you can do is download a bootable antivirus scanner. There are ample of them available. They are free and are capable of scanning your system from root. There is no need of OS here. So if there is some serious virus in your system then that can be cleaned through them. They are also called as rescue disc. But I will not recommend you to use advance options. Go with basic cleaning only. The best one that I use is Bit-defender Rescue Disk. You can download the iso file from web and burn that on a DVD. Just run a full system scan, that's all. It will clean your system from unwanted infection.

Try Kaspersky Rescue Disk. This another great bootable antivirus scanner that works well with the cleaning process. It is a 237mb iso file which is easy to use. It gives you option to scan boot sectors, startup objects and the complete hard drive. The process takes time but it is really effective.