Is your Windows computer getting slow?

My laptop very recently got much slower than usual. The harddisk LED was permanently on and it too ages for it to hibernate. I cleaned some garbage from the harddisk and could not really see in the ProcessExplorer what was keeping the system busy.

Today afternoon it finally got out of control and suddenly I saw it: a single process was keeping the harddisk busy: wicainventory.exe.

I never had a virus on my computers and I didn’t really suspect this task to be a third party virus – and indeed it came with a so-called Windows Update. Why I haven’t seen it as the culprit earlier, I don’t know, but a Google search quickly pointed me to a thread on Microsoft’s own support forum: wicainventory. exe causes high CPU usage

The consensus in this discussion thread was that this task is sending huge amounts of telemetry data back to Microsoft – without asking permission and with a severe blocking of the rest of the Windows system. It arrived on my computer with the Windows Update KB2952664.

And yes, it was quite easy to get the computer to perform OK again by just uninstalling this particular Windows Update!