Slow puter

[Sawyer]

A few weeks ago I came to the screen and there were like 200 windows open. Different programs like 80 versions of max etc... Also Nortons autoprotect was down and I could not enable it, closed everything, called Norton and of course they said they could not help me as I was on an older version that was no longer supported (my virus library was up to date) Anyway I bought the newest Norton & it found no viruses. I did a few different spyware scans and nothing. I havn't had another incident like that but seems like everything is a bit slow mabye only 10% but if have nothing open no programs task manager shows 30-70% cpu usage. Whats going on? What can I do to find out whats going on?

 

Anyway thanks.

[bigroo]

What processes & cpu usage are you registering? Can you see anything suspect? Any process you're unsure about, Google it to see what it does and run a full system scan etc.

Another option is to do a system restore to a time that it ran fine.

[Sawyer]

Last night things got so slow I shut down. Now all is much better. The main ones that have been showing up as a hog are now low but here are what they have been.

 

svchost.exe - 24%

rundll32.exe - 24%

GhostTray.exe - 24% (this is one of the symantic products)

 

Currently only thing that is high is the System Idle Procesess at 95%.

 

See I don't know what many of these things are or quite frankly how to end them. The new version of Norton does come with a special preocess look up function that will Google any process you select. With the 2 processes I have listed it showed that they were system files that were needed or could be a virus. I don't know how to tell. I have done many full system scans since the original incident and nothing comes up.

 

Although last night when I started max a strange window came up. It looked like it was a part of max but I couldn't tell. I did not see it long enough to tell what it was. It cleared once max started and it never came up on the task bar.

[JamesTaylor]

your best bet may be to do a complete reinstall, i find its the only way to be completely satisfied! Plus it'll take a couple of hours and you'll easily spend longer than that searching for the problem.

 

Depending on how you have your drives setup it should be straight forward and it'll remove any lingering doubts about it, if at the back of your mind you are worrying about the presence of something unwanted its going to bug you every time a glitch or some thing out of the ordinary happens.

 

just my thoughts anyway!

[alfienoakes]

svchost is a process that is required. Its to do with DLL's etc.

 

Rundll is also required, and neither should be stopped. svchost, may also run multiple instances of itself. This is normal.

 

But 24% usage is huge.. they should both run in the background.

 

Do you have any spyware installed? If not, I would run Adaware first of, see what it throws up..

 

Andy

 

Also, the svchost is valid, but svhost is the one that could be a virus..

[Sawyer]

Yeah I have 2 spy ware one is Adware the other is Spy Sweeper. Both came up clean. I restarted the other day and everything is fine now. Bah. BAH!

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

have you tried killing ghosttray for awhile, and see how it runs? i have never been a fan of norton products.

[gfa2]

maybe also try msconfig and look at the startup tab. It can be shocking when you see how much crap is getting loaded when you turn your computer on.

[ronel]

try to DEFRAG the whole system, maybe some initiation files got misplaced and mess out to its original directory.

[Allen]

Spyware...You gotta love jerks that write and post that stuff... My wife's computer was affected this way about a year ago. I found that the only way to KNOW the computer is clean is to reformat and then reinstall. A huge hassle, but insures your computer is clean and once again fast.