Windows 10 – Spinning Blue Circle

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[Kathy Stevens]

Since being pushed, by Microsoft, from Windows 10 1809 to 1903 in late December we have begun to experience the brief appearance of a spinning blue circle adjacent to the cursor. It happens on startup and periodically while using the desktop. We did not encounter the circle while the machine’s operating system was Windows 10 1809.

The computer in question is just over a year old and has an Intel Core i7-8700 CPU @ 3.20GHz processor, 16 GB of memory, a 2TB SSD and a 2TB conventional hard drive, as well as an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB graphics card.

We experience the brief appearance of the spinning blue circle at both startup and during normal, non-demanding, activities such as while using MS Word 2016.

In addition, since moving to Windows 10 1903 we have experienced the periodic freezing of Microsoft Office Home and Business 2016 in general and repeatedly while trying to convert email delivered to Outlook 2016 using Adobe Acrobat X version 10.1.16.

A web search has revealed that there are numerous tweaks that may remedy the situation.

My overall preference is not to start fiddling with the Windows 10 operating system.

Has anyone noticed the appearance of the spinning blue circle after updating Windows 10 to 1903?

If so, have you figured out what is causing it and a simple remedy?

• This topic was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by Kathy Stevens.

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That indicates something is taking up lots of CPU in the background.
I would run Resource Monitor (right click on the Taks bar, Task Manager, Performance, Open Resource Monitor). Leave it running in the background and after a few spinning circles view RM and turn off monitoring (Monitor, Stop Monitoring), to see what was the busy beaver.

cheers, Paul

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jburk07, bashbish, Kathy Stevens

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Yes I have experienced this spinning blue circle. I have tried using the suggested resource manager but no significant CPU use by any programs etc.

As a separate matter I have been experiencing explorer.exe taking 50% of CPU for no good reason and the only way to stop it is reboot. (also have i7 3.2 GHz CPU)

I have MB Premium and Avast AV which scans both come up clean.

Oh W7 I do miss thee !!

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jburk07, Charlie, Kathy Stevens

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I also run task manager frequently and found that Windows 10 telemetry and Desktop Windows Manager  are some of the culprits.

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jburk07, Charlie, bashbish

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You may know this but, I have gone to Settings,Privacy and reviewed every category. I changed whatever I had to to get maximum privacy. When you mentioned Telemetry, DIAGNOSTICS and FEEDBACK settings came to mind. Diagnostics on BASIC, Feedback click NEVER.

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jburk07, Kathy Stevens

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Like yourself, we have adjusted our Windows 10 computer for maximum privacy.

Quite frankly, the spinning blue circle is more of a distraction then a problem with an Intel Core i7-8700 CPU. But anyone who has upgraded an older Windows 7 or 8 machine to 10 and/or has a weaker processor may run into a problem.

I have been running Task Manager all day and have not run into the problem.

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jburk07

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The spinning blue circle indicates that the system is busy, but it’s not necessarily high CPU.  It could be waiting for some other resource to become available, and one possibility is your disk drive.  Is it at or near capacity?  If not an SSD, is it badly fragmented?  If it’s a network drive, any problems with the network?  Have you run chkdsk /f on it recently?  Do you have any other programs running which have high I/O usage?  How old is the drive – could be due for replacement?  Could be that when you want to access a particular file on the disk (for example, opening a document from within Word), there is a wait because the read/write heads are busy with another task, and/or there is a rotational delay to access that file (again, not for an SSD).

Windows 10 Pro 64 bit 20H2

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Kathy Stevens

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[Kathy Stevens]

Our PC has two drives – a 2TB SSD C drive and a second 2TB conventional hard drive. The C drive is used for the operating system, applications, and data storage. The second drive is used for a system backup every evening.

Both drives are just a year old and our Western Digital drive check software indicates that there are no problems with either drive.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by Kathy Stevens.

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