CPU spiking when idle

It seems that when I leave my laptop alone to go into sleep mode, the CPU keeps spiking at rather random intervals. Sometimes it spikes to 30% on one core just for a second.

I have it set to dim display at 5 minutes, turn monitor off at 15 minutes, and to sleep at 20 minutes. It seems that just before the screen turns off, at about 14 minutes the BFE service and svchost.exe (defragsvc) take up about 50% of my CPU!!

I have also seen the ssdp discovery service running and taking up some CPU power aswell

This is a relatively new windows 7 installation, so I don't know what went wrong. I installed it on the 12th and don't want to format again because the updates may push me over my internet bandwidth limit.

Are these kind of spikes normal??
I am EXTREMELY paranoid of viruses and malware

So far I have run a full scan of Microsoft security essentials, Malwarebytes anti malware, and Spybot search and destroy, none have found anything at all.

Before the reformat I haven't experienced anything like these spikes. I don't know if that's because I haven't been paying attention to it this much, or if something has infected me, or if something is wrong with my windows 7 installation...

All help is greatly appreciated!

Reply 1 : CPU spiking when idle

Windows 7 is by far the least "quiet" of the Windows OSes. That is, it is normal for it to spike like that as it indexes or does something else.

However I find most folk are blissfully unaware that we still must find and install drivers for our machines even when Windows 7 seems to have found them all. For example my last install had me install Intel's storage manager even though I didn't have RAID.

You also write SPYBOT which conflicts with some apps today. I'd remove that.
Bob

Reply 2 : CPU spiking when idle

I guess that's true :/ I'm going to be using my linux partition more often...

I'm almost completely sure I have all of my drivers. Possibly one or two of them may be old... or I may have forgotten to install on or two of them...

Oh yes and for spybot I uninstalled it right after it gave me the information that I was clean, I usually never use it but I just needed a third thumbs up to calm my virus paranoia

Thanks yet again Bob, you're a life saver.
The stress would have driven me insane...