Hi, Andy. Welcome to Sysnative.
Rest assured, you are not bothering us!
First a question: Did you intentionally install Advanced System Care? As it is your PC, it is, of course, your choice. However, I personally do not recommend using registry cleaners/system optimizers. Please consider that Windows is a closed source system. Developers of registry cleaners do not have the core code of Windows and are not working on definitive information, but rather they are going on past knowledge and experience. Automatic cleaners will usually have to do some guesswork.
In addition, modifying registry keys incorrectly can cause Windows instability, or make Windows unbootable. No registry cleaner is completely safe and the potential is ever present to cause more problems than they claim to fix. Further, registry cleaners cannot distinguish between good and bad. If you run a registry cleaner, it will delete all those keys which are obsolete and sitting idle; but in reality, those keys may well be needed by some programs or windows at a later time.
The removal of a few keys will not make 1 millisecond's difference in performance. If you run a registry cleaner and do not know precisely what you are doing, you will have problems down the road. There are no gains to be had from using a registry cleaner and the risk is great.
Taking it a step further, Microsoft does not support the use of registry cleaners. See Microsoft support policy for the use of registry cleaning utilities
That said, using Windows Task Manager (keyboard shortcut: CTRL+SHIFT+ESC) click on the Processes tab then click the Memory tab to sort from highest to lowest. You can also sort by the CPU tab. What is the name of the program listed as using the most Memory/CPU?
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With regard to not getting updates, it is also possible that is related to the high CPU usage you are seeing. Please see this topic: GUIDE: Windows Vista, 7, 8 - Very Slow Scan Times When Checking for Updates. In the event you don't find that helpful or are uncomfortable with the suggestions there, to receive help with Windows Update, follow the instructions in Windows Update Forum Posting Instructions and create a new topic there with the requested files.