Recently, I’ve come across an annoying problem in Windows 7. There seems to be a service, named PresentationFontCache.exe, that hogs CPU power for an extended period of time – which can be extremely annoying when playing games or using CPU-intensive applications.

From research, the service seems to be part of the ‘Windows Presentation Foundation service’ and doesn’t appear to be anything harmful – just a nuisance. It would be a bad idea to kill the service permanently as it is quite important (although many have resorted to killing it without major issues), however there is a good fix which I’ve come across.

To fix the problem, we simply need to remove the cache that it creates.

Head to C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local (it won’t show up in Windows Explorer – you’ll need to manually navigate to it). Now in this directory you should see up to three files – named as follows:

• FontCache3.0.0.0
• FontCache-System
• FontCache-S-xxxxxx….

If you delete the file FontCache3.0.0.0 whilst the PresentationFontCache.exe service is killed (kill it from Task Manager), it should resolve your problem. I actually removed all three files and it hasn’t done any damage, but I’m relatively sure you only need to remove FontCache3.0.0.0. Apparently, in some cases, the file may be called FontCache4.0.0.0 – in which case remove that file. 

Once that’s done, reboot your computer and all should be resolved!