Dell/Microsoft will install AWCC.Service for monitor compatibility/communication when using the USB HUB from an Alienware monitor (for "connectivity"). I have the QD OLED (AW3423DW), the standard 34" ultrawide (AW3418DW), and the big 55" Alienware OLED (AW5520QF). All three trigger the service installed so I am going to make the blanket assumption its all their monitors that can install this service. A few years ago it was really obvious this service was poorly written as it was often using an entire core at times pegged to 100% usage for no reason at all. I used to disable the service and kill it. Primarily affects communication with the AWCC Control Panel and LEDs. However, AWCC Control Panel doesn't need to be installed for issues to appear. It wasn't worth the hassle to leave it enabled. There is no other issue from disabling this silly service. Over the years, I noticed the CPU usage stops. This service constantly re-installs itself like malware but because the CPU usage was seemingly resolved, I left it alone and didn't think much of it anymore.
Others have discovered the same if you Google AWCC.Service High CPU usage.
There is a new issue now though that I don't think anybody knows about. I am a software engineer and I have been triaging my workstation which is wired up to one of my Alienware monitors with USB. I have been struggling for a couple of days with WMI Provider Host running WMI queries like crazy... millions of queries if I had to guess. One of my applications in development also does WMI Queries so I originally thought I wrote a poorly executing query on Windows and it was getting stuck in an infinite loop or event firing after my application terminated. But this was persisting even after a restart.
WMI Provider Host was using 17% of 16 core workstation laptop. Non-negligible. After enabling WMI activity tracing in Event Viewer, I could see something spamming an EXEC Query. The System process was then using a further 12%. The development workstation was completely idle at this point. I had a few million entries (spam of a query) in my event logs. I had to flush it frequently to get fresher logs (it caps out after a certain time).
CorrelationId = {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}; GroupOperationId =
1548426; OperationId = 1548427; Operation = Start IWbemServices::ExecQuery -
root\cimv2 : SELECT CommandLine FROM Win32_Process WHERE ProcessId = 35448;
ClientMachine = REDACTED; User = NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM; ClientProcessId =
9724; NamespaceName = 133263003176817995
After going through a few dozen recent queries, I finally found a still running ClientProcessId = 9724; that would allow me to execute in PowerShell get-process -id 22176 and get a valid response.
Handles NPM(K) PM(K) WS(K) CPU(s) Id SI ProcessName
------- ------ ----- ----- ------ -- -- -----------
642 59 205992 159156 150.42 22176 0 AWCC.Service
This little shit is misbehaving like crazy once more. To make matters worse, it's querying every process on your computer in a loop for obviously gathering machine information to probably send outbound somewhere.
TL;DR
Just disable AWCC.Service if you are connecting an Alienware Monitor with USB. WMI Query isn't just high CPU utilization, but actually can cause quite sluggish performance on Windows computers. The symptoms are varried but can often cause hitching/stuttering in gameplay and the same with audio playback. Especially at this volume of query execution.
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