Do I need to reformat....again!?!

leinstergurl

Am I going to have to reformat my laptop again?I'm running XP and the last while it's gone really slow, systems resources are almost always running at 100% and I cant figure out why...Can anyone help??

Thanks

Ruu_Old

When did you format last? Have you got any anti-virus or anti-spyware software? What programs are running in the background?

Hal1

Have you tried scanning for spyware, try spybot.

leinstergurl

Hiya..

Probably only formatted a couple of months ago..I have anti virus running as well i get it with my UTV broadband....I havent ran spybot i can do that now alrite..how do i check what's running in the background(just to be sure im doing the right thing!)?

Capt'n Midnight

procexp is handy to see what is running in the background. Also you choose to display another column for the command line. This will ID exactly where the program started especially if it uses another name for it's process.

start up the computer in safe mode too to see if faster.

leinstergurl

Ran spybot 10 things were found,2 in registery and the rest were in cookies...

Does seem to run faster in safe mode as there seems to be only about 5 or 6 process's running where in mine right now there's like 61 running and CPU Usage is 100%, i only have 1 window open....

leinstergurl

Capt'n Midnight...
Ive downloaded and am running procexp jeeze how dya know what your looking at though..?It looks really confusing??

Capt'n Midnight

if it's faster in safe mode then for deffo you have unneeded stuff running

things to check for - is the antivirus doing a daily scan of the entire drive ?

what are the top few things using cpu

leinstergurl

It seems to be set to do a weekly virus scan..every friday...

AlmightyCushion

leinstergurl wrote: »

It seems to be set to do a weekly virus scan..every friday...

Did you run this in safe mode when you took this screen capture?

leinstergurl

No that's just a regular startup...

but i can take a screen shot in safemode and show ye if ye want..? That's most of the screen..theres still more stuff underneath what's shown there....

AlmightyCushion

leinstergurl wrote: »

No that's just a regular startup...
but i can take a screen shot in safemode and show ye if ye want..?

Well going by that your cpu is running at just over 3%. Was the computer really slow when you were running this?

leinstergurl

It does that from time to time will drop to a normal level but then after a few mins will jump back up again, Right now its showing as 100%

AlmightyCushion

leinstergurl wrote: »

It does that from time to time will drop to a normal level but then after a few mins will jump back up again, Right now its showing as 100%

We need to find out what process is causing it to spike to 100%. Open task manager and watch it until it spikes again.

leinstergurl

Grabbed this one at 100%...iexplore.exe seems to take upat least half of the 100% most of the time...(although not all the time)

AlmightyCushion

I can't see anything about iexplore.exe in that screen cap. I need clarification, is it iexplore.exe or iexplorer.exe? Note the "r" in the second one. If it is iexplore.exe then it's internet explorer causing the problem. If it's iexplorer.exe then you can delete this process.

leinstergurl

I'll check now when it hits 100 or close again,not surenow which one it was..im just looking at the icon in the taskbar that shows the little graph/picture thingy(great explinations i know!!:))

its iexplore.exe as far as i can see,its not actually spiked at 100% yet...typical when your waiting on it !!

AlmightyCushion

leinstergurl wrote: »

I'll check now when it hits 100 or close again,not surenow which one it was..im just looking at the icon in the taskbar that shows the little graph/picture thingy(great explinations i know!!:))

its iexplore.exe as far as i can see,its not actually spiked at 100% yet...typical when your waiting on it !!

iexplore.exe is internet explorer. iexplorer.exe is bad.

leinstergurl

it is iexplore.exe ....Right now it says CPU Usage...64% and iexplore.exe 46%...so it seems to be using up half the usage....can this be fixed?

FruitLover

It could be a rogue IE add-on - in the IE window, go to Tools -> Internet Options, then the Programs tab, and click the 'manage add-ons' button (assuming IE7). Try disabling any add-ons you don't recognize, restart the browser and see if that helps.

By the way, continuously reinstalling Windows is not addresssing the root issue - you need to figure out why you keep mauling Windows so badly. As an example, I've never had to reinstall Windows since 2000, as I'm careful about what I do with it.

leinstergurl

FruitLover wrote: »

By the way, continuously reinstalling Windows is not addresssing the root issue - you need to figure out why you keep mauling Windows so badly. As an example, I've never had to reinstall Windows since 2000, as I'm careful about what I do with it.

Well thanks for that, Im actually here to get help so i dont have to reformat it, very little is downloaded onto my laptop so im hardly "mauling" it, that's great that YOU'VE not had to reinstall since 2000,wow..congratulations quite an achievement!

Capt'n Midnight

If you click on the top of the cpu colum it will sort them that way Control-T to get back to the process view

F-Secure is your AV
Broadcom is you wireless

if you leave the PC sitting there with the internet closed how does the cpu usage look,

do you have adobe acrobat - some suff like that links into IE

leinstergurl

HeyCapt'n....yes it seems to run fairly high still even when i X off the internet ,do have adobe,but its really the most basic one i dont think ive actually ever upgraded it ..