Quite recently my computer's CPU usage has shot up to 100% and stayed there. I went into the Resource Monitor and it seems that lxebcoms.exe has been using around 30% of my CPU at all times. I searched the internet and figured out that it has something to do with my Lexmark printer. I don't have the printer connected very often (indeed, it was not connected when it started eating my CPU) and I have no idea why that .exe would be running constantly. So I suspended the process (for now, until I find out more). If anyone has any further information on this, it would be much appreciated.

If you type msconfig into your search bar (or into the 'run' box if you're not using Windows 7) and click on the 'startup' tab you can find a list of all programs which start up when you turn on your computer. You can stop it from running automatically on startup if you uncheck the box next to it. That might help.

Hm. Yeah, that could help. But I have already suspended the process. It isn't giving me any more grief. I just want to know what on Earth is going on with it. Thanks for the help, though!

I think you will have to contact the manufacturer of the printer to get to know what their software is doing in the background. Perhaps it is trying to connect to the printer all the time? Or just some bug in the software... We can hardly tell from here.

I think I have figured it out. It is a wireless printer and I think it has been trying to connect to the printer. Thanks for the help though. Problem solved.

I'm having a CPU usage issue too.
Recently my computer has been running very slow and freezing up. I was curious as to why so I opened task manager and found Firefox taking up 2 million K of memory... 2 Million. So I restarted it and eventually after many restarts got it down to about 400,000 K. I still thought this was really high for only having two tabs open one facebook and one just sitting on google.com. My cpu usage at the time was going bonkers, it would dip to 2 percent then go to 98 and then somewhere in the middle and then hit 100.

I ended up ditching firefox completely and installing chrome to see if that would make a difference. So far chrome has been a little better but my computer started slowing again. If I have more than two tabs open (sometimes I have four going at once) then my CPU usage is everywhere.

What could be causing this?
I dont have any extensions or plug ins except adobe reader and a flash plug in.
Also I only have necessary programs running on my computer, nothing extra like minecraft. Occasionally Open office is running because I'm working on a paper. At most I also have skype running.

The same thing used to happen to me. I never found a solution that didn't require me ditching Windows, so I'm afraid I can't give too much useful advice. And actually, Firefox is better with these things than Chrome, or so I believe, because Chrome opens a new process for each tab.

Yeah, Chrome opens new processes in new tabs. This might be more expensive (in terms of CPU usage) if you have a single core, but on multi-core CPUs, it's an advantage. And Firefox is known for its memory leakage, that (AFAIK) hasn't been fixed yet. Ah, the disadvantages of open source projects.

1. It's called "free software". Open source was a term ESR made up for clarification/getting businesses on his side.
2. You really can't generalize this.

I'm pretty sure Firefox is open source. The source is public, and anyone can join in and edit it. The problem is: fixing memory leaks and managing memory is a hard-to-program and boring thing to do. So no one does it. If a program is developed by a for-profit company, they just tell people to do it. But don't get me wrong, I'm all for open source, but this is one of the disadvantages.

I can name some counter-examples--kernel modules on the Linux kernel

Yeah. But memory usage has been dealt with since the very beginning there. The firefox guys only needed to do so when FF became bloated.

Chrome consumes a lot of ram at startup, less than Firefox though, so for old computers it's not really a solution. If you got enough ram though and you don't run 54 other background applications which consume it all, Chrome is a lot faster than Firefox and IE. Opera is surprisingly fast for the number of features you get, but it's somewhere between Chrome's and Firefox's ram and cpu usage.

(From personal experience, I don't have any numbers to back me up at all).

When my cpu usage was really high it was because of spyware running under the process relevantknowledge.exe. Since I got rid of that I haven't had a problem.

Within the last few months, Firefox has become quite fast.
However, the fact that Chromium creates a new process for each tab causes it to slow down is... well, not a fact. It allows easy parallelization between multiple processors and isolates webpages so one page crashing does not bring down the whole browser.

I'm still on board for free software despite it's technical benefits or drawsides--the four software freedoms are freedoms every piece of software (save for COBOL or JCL) should grant. Free software argues that those freedoms should be granted regardless of utility. Open source argues that it's convenient to do so.

1. Chrome is fastest on a slow computer, but will slow it down if you're not running a multi-core processor. If your computer has no issues, Firefox, IE, and Chrome are all equally as fast. Yes, really.
2. Firefox IS open-source. Whoever said that is correct, and you explained it well, too. Like Linux, anyone can mod and/or improve the program, and the developers will probably update it it with your additions, and credit your name.
3. Whoever said something about the bugs is correct, too. But it really doesn't matter if you have a faster computer, like I just said. And they aren't getting fixed mostly because... well, most programmers tend to be extremely lazy. It's kind of funny to watch them, actually. Not so fun to be one.

There is a thread on browsers, actually. Possibly in the Hobbies thread? Not sure, but unless either the OP or the other inquirer need additional help, this thread should be resolved.

My problem has been resolved for a while. I am not sure why this hasn't been marked as resolved yet.

EDIT: Thanks to whichever mod (or Blake) marked this.

I know it is free software, I just object to the term open-source being blanketly used towards pieces of free software. Also: Linux is just the kernel. The system is GNU

Okay, that's wonderful. Next time, why not give the definition of open-source? ("of or relating to or being computer software for which the source code is freely available.") And if I at all mentioned Linux, wouldn't I at least know what it was? There's no need to correct me for using a blanket term for all Linux distros.