Q. My Network Location Awareness service is using a lot of CPU. Can I turn it off?

A. The Network Location Awareness service is responsible for tracking the type of network your computer is connected to (Public, Private, or Domain) and the speed of that connection. This is used for firewall policies, group policy, and various other network related services. Turning this service off isn't recommended and shouldn't be necessary because typically, it uses almost no CPU or bandwidth. If the service is using resources on your computer, it's likely that there's a problem with your NIC driver, so try updating to the latest NIC driver.

It's also possible that the switch your computer is connected to has problems and is constantly changing your network state, so get your network administrators to check the switch log for any problems.