Machine slows to crawl, no other program running

[CharlesBlackstone]

Hello, I ran sypbot and ad aware and have Sophos antivirus running all
the time. Something has been boggin my system down later, so I have to
wait for every little task. I have a Dell D800 laptop with 2 gigs of
ram. When no progrms are running, in the performance dialoge, the
pages/sec is completely maxed out TEh cpu is running about 70% and the
average cue length is about 60 percent. I have 14 items in my system
tray, sophos anti virus, spybot, smart sync for backups, hotsync for
palm, hot folders, which gives recent folders, ad aware service, the
rest are sound, disconnect device, windows stuff. 49 processes are
running. SavService a sophos part is using significant parts of cpu,
40, 50, .... But I need it.
If I restart the computer runs great.

Is my computer hijacked? Is something running I can't find? How do I
stop this?

Thanks
Jimk

 

[Plato]

Hello, I ran sypbot and ad aware and have Sophos antivirus running all
the time. Something has been boggin my system down later, so I have to
wait for every little task. I have a Dell D800 laptop with 2 gigs of
ram. When no progrms are running, in the performance dialoge, the
pages/sec is completely maxed out TEh cpu is running about 70% and the
average cue length is about 60 percent. I have 14 items in my system
tray, sophos anti virus, spybot, smart sync for backups, hotsync for
palm, hot folders, which gives recent folders, ad aware service, the
rest are sound, disconnect device, windows stuff. 49 processes are
running. SavService a sophos part is using significant parts of cpu,
40, 50, .... But I need it.
If I restart the computer runs great.

Is my computer hijacked? Is something running I can't find? How do I
stop this?

14 items is a tad too much. One of them is bogging down your system.

 

[crazyal]

i am running sophos on a older system and it does not use that much
cpu usage it only uses 3% at the most.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Charles-
This is John, a support technician working from Dell headquarters. I
wanted to chime in and see if I could help.
I agree with Plato, 14 processes in your systray is a tad too much,

The *number of items in the system tray (or even the total number of
background programs running) is almost completely irrelevant. What is
important is *which* programs they are. Some of them can hurt
performance severely, but others have no effect on performance.

and
one of them is most likely causing the problem.

That could very well be. If it is one of them, then that's the
issue--*which* one is the one causing the problem, not how many there
are.