In general, high CPU usage is not a significant cause for concern as long as it doesn’t occur over the long-term or is due to an unidentifiable cause. But there’s always the danger that your PC may freeze whilst your working on an important work assignment and that you’ll lose your unsaved data after the unscheduled restart. For this reason alone, you should always try to reduce high CPU usage.
A second hazard is that your CPU temperature will become too high. Most operating systems and processors are developed in such a way that they automatically protect the system from overheating, e.g. by adjusting fan speed and curbing CPU activities – much to the disappointment of many gamers who specifically overclock their CPUs in order to improve processing power.
If one of the above-mentioned causes applies, you should close the relevant programs, preferably deactivate or uninstall them, or run them one at a time, depending on the best solution in your specific case. In general, a computer operates more quickly and smoothly if few CPU-intensive processes are running at the same time. It makes sense then, to regularly check your CPU usage so that you can terminate programs that unnecessarily burden the system, and in doing so optimize your PC’s performance.
However, if a system process is slowing down your computer, caution is advised. First of all, read up on the relevant process online to find out more about it. The same applies to processes that you cannot allocate. A quick online search may save you time and spare you issues that can emerge from terminating a process that is system-related. Doing so, you may learn more about the processes that run on your operating system.