Notebook Software and How To Questions

Hello,

For the past few weeks, my PC has been experiencing sudden CPU usage spikes that cause graphics and processing lag. I put my computer to sleep when I am not using it, and often, while asleep, it will suddenly start running at a furious pace and continue doing so for hours on end until I manually wake it up and put it back to sleep.

If I open Task Manager while I'm experiencing a CPU spike, I see that an application called "hp-plugin-executor" is using up most or all of the CPU. I did some looking around the Internet, and it seems that other people have been experiencing similar problems with other HP apps, but I haven't been able to find anyone else experiencing difficulties with hp-plugin-executor. It doesn't appear on the list of apps I can disable at startup, and if I manually end the process from Task Manager, it just starts back up again on its own later.

How can I disable or fix hp-plugin-executor? I don't want to go poking around in my hard drive unless I know what I'm looking for, so I don't accidentally disable/uninstall something important.

Thank you in advance.