eternal thinking

[j lunis]

Vista Home Premium 32
Recently my pc seems to be 'thinking' almost constantly. That is, the
hour-glass equivalent seems to always be active as if its trying to open
an app or complete a task. How do I find out what it is trying to do?

 

[Malke]

Vista Home Premium 32
Recently my pc seems to be 'thinking' almost constantly. That is, the
hour-glass equivalent seems to always be active as if its trying to open
an app or complete a task. How do I find out what it is trying to do?

The First Question Of Troubleshooting: If the problem is new, what changed
between the time things worked and the time they didn't?

The Second Question of Windows Troubleshooting: what is the malware/virus
status of the machine? If you think it is clean, what programs (and
versions) did you use to determine this?

Be sure the computer is clean:
http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/page2.html#Removing_Malware

For a real-time picture of what is going on, you can use the free Process
Monitor:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx

See what is running at Startup with the free Autoruns:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

Malke

 

[j lunis]

Open Task Manager and sort on CPU usage. See what process is hogging
everything. If it's not obvious then use other diagnostic tools as
*Malke* suggested.

Also if you run with automatic updates allowed to just install
unsupervised then it's tough to get a feel for your machine. I'm a
believer in only changing one thing at a time. If you do put on
updates, I'd recommend doing it manually, see if things seem ok for
awhile, then do another one. If you change 8 things at once it makes it
that much tougher to track down what happened. If you change one thing,
stuff goes bad, chances of fixing it right away are a lot higher.

OK, I did that. Two apps seem to be related to the 'thinking.' First,
though, I said eternal thinking. Not quite right. It blinks on and off
- thinking for a few seconds, not for a few seconds. The app that seems
to change memory use with each on/off is rundll32 - Windows Host
Process. The other app that changes frequently with the on/off but not
every time is ccsvc??? - Symantec Service Framework. What have I learned?