Windows 11 mouse stutter with low CPU? Check for Intel’s hidden telemetry (esrv_svc / QUEENCREEK)

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Random_Admin

My mouse started stuttering on a machine that had no business stuttering — an i9-14900K with 64GB of RAM, NVMe storage, and a Task Manager that swore everything was fine. CPU under 30%, disk latency under 2ms, RAM barely touched, GPU idle. The cursor hitched anyway, all day. A reboot fixed it… for a couple of hours. Then it came back.

The culprit turned out to be something I didn’t install on purpose and you probably didn’t either: Intel’s System Usage Report / Energy Server telemetry, internally codenamed QUEENCREEK. It rides along with Intel driver packages (Driver & Support Assistant, graphics/chipset installers, the “Intel Computing Improvement Program” checkbox nobody reads). If you have it, this post is your fix.

The 60-second check

Open PowerShell and run:

Get-Process esrv, esrv_svc, SurSvc -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Get-Service | Where-Object { $_.Name -match 'QUEENCREEK|SUR' }

If you see processes like esrv_svc / SurSvc and services like ESRV_SVC_QUEENCREEK or SystemUsageReportSvc_QUEENCREEK, you’ve got it.

Then check the smoking gun — context switches per second:

(Get-Counter '\System\Context Switches/sec' -SampleInterval 2 -MaxSamples 3).CounterSamples |
    ForEach-Object { [math]::Round($_.CookedValue/1000,0).ToString() + "k/s" }

A healthy desktop idles around 20–50k/s. My machine was oscillating between 100k and 340k/s while “idle.” If you’re seeing six figures with nothing running, keep reading.

The fix

Stop and disable the telemetry services (elevated PowerShell):

'ESRV_SVC_QUEENCREEK','SystemUsageReportSvc_QUEENCREEK',
'USER_ESRV_SVC_QUEENCREEK','Intel(R) SUR QC SAM' | ForEach-Object {
    Stop-Service $_ -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
    Set-Service $_ -StartupType Disabled -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
}

The stutter should stop immediately — mine dropped from 178k context switches/sec to 70k the moment the services died, and the cursor went glass-smooth.

Then uninstall it for good: Settings → Apps → Installed apps, remove “Intel® System Usage Report” and/or “Intel® Computing Improvement Program” if present.

One warning: Intel driver updates can quietly reinstall this. If the stutter ever comes back after a driver update, run the Get-Process esrv* check first before blaming anything else.

Everything it wasn’t (save yourself the afternoon)

Before finding this, the symptom pointed convincingly at half a dozen innocent things, and I ruled each out live with the stutter active:

  • The mouse itself — switched from Bluetooth to the Lightspeed dongle: no change.
  • Backup software mid-scan (CrashPlan) — stopped it: partial CPU relief, stutter remained.
  • PowerToys, DisplayFusion, G HUB, iCUE — every app with a global input hook, killed one at a time: no change.
  • GPU drivers, DPC/interrupt storms, network storms, VSS snapshots, device flapping — all clean in traces and event logs.

That’s the nasty part of this bug: it impersonates every classic stutter cause while hiding somewhere nobody looks, and the reboot-fixes-it-temporarily pattern makes whatever you tried last look like the fix.

Why a telemetry service can stutter your mouse (the fun part)

QUEENCREEK’s Energy Server (esrv_svc) samples the CPU’s hardware energy and performance counters at high frequency — including a branch-record (LBR) trace session against every core. Each sample fires a hardware interrupt, and Windows dispatches those through a pair of kernel interrupt-dispatch threads.

I captured a Windows Performance Recorder trace during the stutter and crunched it with xperf: 5.18 million context switches in 25 seconds. Two System-process threads accounted for nearly a million of them, blocked on WrDispatchInt (interrupt dispatch) 99% of the time — and their number-one waker, by a factor of seven, was esrv_svc.exe.

The result is a scheduler that’s drowning in microscopic wake-ups. Almost no CPU time is consumed — which is why Task Manager looks innocent — but the input and compositor threads keep getting elbowed, and you feel every elbow in your wrist.

Bonus: because SUR runs scheduled collection sweeps, it can also masquerade as mysterious periodic slowdowns — in my case, a string of unexplained morning system crawls that predated the mouse symptom entirely.

TL;DR

Mouse stutters, Task Manager says everything’s fine, reboots fix it temporarily → check for esrv_svc and the QUEENCREEK services, disable them, uninstall Intel System Usage Report, and recheck after every Intel driver update.

Previous fix: