Annoying Windows XP System Processes

[Tiger Moth]

For the last several hours my dual processor laptop has been tied up. I am assuming it is running some Windows system process doing god knows what. And I am thinking that possibly this is supposed to happen in the middle of the night (which it is now in Microsoft land but in the middle of the day here in LOS).

 

As I type this the letters show up a half second after I type them. That is the degree to which the system is tied up (I am doing nothing other than this and have no other applications open).

 

Any thoughts on how I can prevent this occasional pain in the ass?

[soongmak]

You should open task management and see what processes are running and how much memory they use. It doesn't have to be a windows process. Several programs have the annoying habit of starting up when you start up your computer. If that's the case, a start up manager could help you by disallowing useless processes and programs to start up automatically. I use the free version of Winpatrol for this.

 

 

 

 

[Tiger Moth]

I looked at Task Manager and there were something like 64 tasks running. The vast majority meant nothing to me. I will do a google on the Software you mentioned.

[khunsanuk]

Hi,

 

I second soongmak's recommendation of WinPatrol. It's very useful.

 

Sanuk!

 

[carlton68]

Tiger Moth,

 

in the task managers process list you have the possibility to sort the list according to various columns. Please sort for CPU-usage. Guess you have to click it twice so the process with the most percentage of CPU usage is on top. If this column is not there go to View - select columns.

Then you'll see which process takes up that much of your CPU to slow you down. Right click the process and set priority to 'idle'. Might help for the moment but is only temporary.

To find a solution you must know what causes the problem.

If there's no process taking up huge amounts of CPU you may check if there's a program that continuously accesses the hard disk, which might slow down the computer as well.

 

A few processes that come into my mind which are mostly useless but can cause these problems.

Indexing: in Windows Explorer right-click on a hard disk / partition - select properties. Here you might disable indexing. If you do computer has to set the attribute for every file on the hard disk. For some this isn't possible, just click 'ignore all' if it comes up.

Other process will be defrag. You have and software that starts defrag at certain times, or when a fragmentation threshold is reached?

Third might be a backup/imaging tool that runs at dertain intervals.

Or any antivir/anti spyware prog that scans the disk at certain intervals? Backup or antivir tools will show up in the process list consuming much of your CPU.

 

Guess that's enough to check for now.

carlton

[Mekong]

Scotty is on Patrol WOOF

 

Same as Soongmak and KS Winpatrol

 

WOOF

[expat]

I use startup control panel and startup monitor.

 

Freeware--very light, very useful.

 

http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml

http://www.mlin.net/StartupMonitor.shtml