suddenly slow WinXP system (taskmgr.exe is the culprit)

[Chris Scott]

A friend of mine called me up yesterday to ask about her home computer,
as it's suddenly slowed to a crawl. I picked the machine up from her
last night and, sure enough, it's totally unusable.

I've checked the Add/Remove Programs control panel to make sure that
there are no suspicious-sounding applications installed. I've run
Ad-Aware to make sure that there wasn't any spyware. And I'm currently
running NAV on the system to check for viruses (she had done this
herself before I picked up the system and it came up clean, but I've
since found that her virus defs hadn't been updated since August, so I
updated them and am re-running the scan).

The culprit is the taskmgr.exe process - looking at Task Manager reports
that taskmgr.exe is chewing up ALL available CPU cycles! All other
process are taking none-to-neglible CPU power, yet taskmgr.exe is taking
up to 80% of it, causing the chip to be constantly constantly pegged at
100%!

This is clearly the problem but I don't know how to resolve it... is
this a virus (the sna is going so slowly that I don't expect it to
finish until tomorrow)?

I tried rebooting into Safe Mode - instead of taskmgr.exe taking all
available CPU horsepower, it uses about 40% (and, again, all other
listed processes take up no CPU cycles). Still not very acceptable.

Does anybody have any idea what's going on here?

 

[Kelly]

Hi Chris,

Suggestion:

Run the Repair on line 113
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm

 

[Jasonc]

also check that you have enough virtual memory available and also hard drive
space is enough for the pc to run. you can clean up the hard drive by the
Disk Cleanup function, and then maybe a defrag might also help with hard
drive saving.

Jason

 

[Kathy]

Hi,

I am also experiencing a problem as are others (Marie,
Dick Shrewsbury, ogi, Courtney, Pat Nolan, Dan, Bill W,
Keith, Mario, Asvin, David Brewster, Yatty, Allen, Chris,
H.P)

Dick, Allen, Mario, and I all get temporarily cured by a
restart of the computer. Do you? This seems to be a
common condition. Dick gets anywhere from a minute to an
hour of computer use before its unusably slow. I've had
2 incidents: Nov 18 and Nov 21 with maybe 8 usable hours.

We also have the CPU in the 90% range when it is slow and
nothing is open/running.

Look for posts with subjects of
Slow computer
High CPU usage

I feel like its a new, undocumented virus thingy

-----Original Message-----
Hi Chris,

Suggestion:

Run the Repair on line 113
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm

--
All the Best,
Kelly

MS-MVP Win98/XP
[AE-Windows® XP]

Troubleshooting Windows XP
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com

Repair/Customize Quick Launch, Taskbar and Notification Area
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/taskbarplus!.htm

A friend of mine called me up yesterday to ask about her home computer,
as it's suddenly slowed to a crawl. I picked the machine up from her
last night and, sure enough, it's totally unusable.

I've checked the Add/Remove Programs control panel to make sure that
there are no suspicious-sounding applications installed. I've run
Ad-Aware to make sure that there wasn't any spyware. And I'm currently
running NAV on the system to check for viruses (she had done this
herself before I picked up the system and it came up clean, but I've
since found that her virus defs hadn't been updated since August, so I
updated them and am re-running the scan).

The culprit is the taskmgr.exe process - looking at Task Manager reports
that taskmgr.exe is chewing up ALL available CPU cycles! All other
process are taking none-to-neglible CPU power, yet taskmgr.exe is taking
up to 80% of it, causing the chip to be constantly constantly pegged at
100%!

This is clearly the problem but I don't know how to resolve it... is
this a virus (the sna is going so slowly that I don't expect it to
finish until tomorrow)?

I tried rebooting into Safe Mode - instead of taskmgr.exe taking all
available CPU horsepower, it uses about 40% (and, again, all other
listed processes take up no CPU cycles). Still not very acceptable.

Does anybody have any idea what's going on here?

.

 

[Chris Scott]

For what it's worth, I was able to solve my problem by resetting the
system's BIOS. Still not sure which setting came into conflict or why,
but that seems to have rectified the problem...

 

[Kelly]

How interesting, Chris.....the 'not sure' would have been great to know.
) Thanks for the feedback.



Doug's Windows XP Security Console
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_securityconsole.htm