I'm being slowly driven crazy. I'm a former IT support professional, but I havent done it professionally for about 2 years. In that time I gave up on computers for anything but light recreational use. Now, I have a laptop that is going buggy and I cant fix it.
At least once during every session, the explorer.exe program freezes up. It makes the processor run at 99-100 percent, and doesnt stop until I end the program manually. This doesnt only happen when I'm actually running Windows Explorer. I'll notice that my computer is suddenly running really slow, check it out, and there will be explorer.exe, running at 99%. This doesnt make any sense to me. I've got good firewall, antivirus, and antiadware programs running, and they arent picking up anything unusual. Any suggestions or ideas?
Posted by Lanfear (Member # 7776) on :
I dont think this will help that much, but how often to you defrag your drive? that can help out a lot...
Posted by Tstorm (Member # 1871) on :
What operating system are you currently using?
Have you recently installed any programs?
Posted by Boris (Member # 6935) on :
In Windows XP, explorer.exe is basically the whole user interface. One major thing to consider is how much RAM is being used by your system vs. how much you have. if you have less than about 20-30% of your RAM free, you run too many background processes for the ammount of RAM you have, and Windows starts using the hard drive as RAM, which is remarkably slow. Access to this process is controlled by explorer.exe. You should probably try shutting down all startup processes you don't need through msconfig.exe (just type msconfig in the run prompt and hit enter). If that doesn't fix things, you may need to get better antivirus and spyware removal software. BTW, Norton and McAfee are big names, but their database is seriously lacking. I've always been able to find more viruses with AVG than with either. As far as Adware Removal, Ad Aware is excellent for finding stuff while Spy Bot is great for blocking stuff. Yeah. That's about all I can tell you.
Posted by foundling (Member # 6348) on :
Well, I'm running XP, and the only program I've recently installed is Warez, a peer to peer software program. i defrag often, and I'm running the AVG antivirus already (it IS much better), and I've got both adaware and SpyDoctor running.
I did seem to have a disportionate amount of programs running at startup, but I had already cleaned out my registry of things that I didnt think were necessary. I went ahead and killed the "performance enhancing" programs that came with the laptop, and some other things that I'm hoping werent really necessary. We'll see.
Thanks for the advice, all .
Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
So, how much ram *do* you have?
Posted by Boris (Member # 6935) on :
Warez is evil. Use Ares instead. Same network, same setup, not ad supported.
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