desperately needed computer help

[TRF]

Originally Posted by Chip R

She's got about 80 GB.

Not HD space, RAM.

If she had 80 GB of RAM, I'd suspect she was working for the CTU.

[Chip R]

Originally Posted by TRF

Not HD space, RAM.

If she had 80 GB of RAM, I'd suspect she was working for the CTU.

Don't know. I'm back here now.

[Chip R]

Originally Posted by TRF

Not HD space, RAM.

If she had 80 GB of RAM, I'd suspect she was working for the CTU.

Since I'm back visiting my mother for the holidays, I thought I'd bring this thread back since her slowness problems are still happening.

She has 512 MB of RAM.

[Highlifeman21]

Originally Posted by Chip R

Since I'm back visiting my mother for the holidays, I thought I'd bring this thread back since her slowness problems are still happening.

She has 512 MB of RAM.

512 MB of RAM is on the bare minimum side, IMO.

Have you defragged her hard drive that has her operating system on it?

I would also do a simple Ctrl + Alt + Delete and open up Task Manager and find out in the Processes tab what is taking up the most Mem Usage. I would also then click on the Performance tab and see how the CPU Usage is doing. With 512 MB RAM, it's very possible there's a lot of background processes running which are bogging the machine down.

[Chip R]

Originally Posted by Highlifeman21

512 MB of RAM is on the bare minimum side, IMO.

Have you defragged her hard drive that has her operating system on it?

I would also do a simple Ctrl + Alt + Delete and open up Task Manager and find out in the Processes tab what is taking up the most Mem Usage. I would also then click on the Performance tab and see how the CPU Usage is doing. With 512 MB RAM, it's very possible there's a lot of background processes running which are bogging the machine down.

Yeah, 512 MB is pretty low but it's always been like that and up until recently it's never been this slow.

I defragged it in October and tried again earlier in the week but it said defragging wasn't recommended.

I did what you suggested in task manager (The CPU percentage is 100%, by the way) and a couple of the processes that took up a lot of memory were Avgtray.exe and qttask.exe. I took them out of the startup and it's still using 100% of the CPU. A couple other processes are two iexplore.exe one is taking up 51,556 K and the other 15,276 K. svchost.exe takes up 20,316K. The big hog is system.exe that takes up 85,364K. explorer.exe takes up 23,492 K.

I just checked some programs and The Sims 2 is on there at 1,390 MB. If I didn't know better, I'd say that might be a problem but it won't uninstall and it hasn't been touched in a year.

[Highlifeman21]

Originally Posted by Chip R

Yeah, 512 MB is pretty low but it's always been like that and up until recently it's never been this slow.

I defragged it in October and tried again earlier in the week but it said defragging wasn't recommended.

I did what you suggested in task manager (The CPU percentage is 100%, by the way) and a couple of the processes that took up a lot of memory were Avgtray.exe and qttask.exe. I took them out of the startup and it's still using 100% of the CPU. A couple other processes are two iexplore.exe one is taking up 51,556 K and the other 15,276 K. svchost.exe takes up 20,316K. The big hog is system.exe that takes up 85,364K. explorer.exe takes up 23,492 K.

I just checked some programs and The Sims 2 is on there at 1,390 MB. If I didn't know better, I'd say that might be a problem but it won't uninstall and it hasn't been touched in a year.

CPU percentage @ 100% is impressive, but also means that all 512 MB of RAM are taken up by all those processes.

Avgtray I'm assuming is the AVG anti-virus and or malware program? If so, need to let that one run.

qttask is QuickTime player, and you can turn that off, and or remove it from your start up menu. Essentially, you don't need to always have qttask running.

Instead of running Internet Explorer (iexplore), I'd recommend Google Chrome or Firefox, as they seem to run faster for me.

svchost has to run, but you can check what's running in that instance of svchost, and then determine if there's any services you can turn off. If you want to disable some services, type "services.msc" in the command line after clicking "run" from the start menu. This will bring up all the services on the computer, and you can manually stop services, as well as right click on a service, go down to properties, and then if you want you can change the startup type to manual if you don't want the service to trigger on startup.

system.exe is, IMO, a virus, based on some google research I just did. I would verify this with your own searches. Looks like it's removable, which is good.

explorer.exe is your Windows XP, and needs to run (obviously).



So, based on everything you told me from the task manager, looks like that system.exe is a virus, and is what's bogging down your RAM.

[Spring~Fields]

Search link for describing system.exe

http://www.bing.com/search?q=what+is...ox&FORM=IE8SRC

Independent virus check and system cleaner, cleaner does not remove viruses, but gets rid of junk and fixes registry errors. Virus check does detect and clean if it can.
link:
http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/default.htm

link for good cleaner for registry and computer, also wipes free space on HD
http://www.ccleaner.com/

If it was mine after you are sure it is free of viruses, and HD and registry is cleaned up I would add an additional stick of RAM which is easy to plug in. Just have to make sure that you get the right type for that computer.

Microsoft security search for "what is system.exe"
Link
http://www.microsoft.com/security/po...s%20system.exe

[kpresidente]

If the system.exe is a virus or spyware, just end the process and see if that fixes things. It might come back when you reboot, but at least you'd know what the problem was and you could get a spyware program to clean it up.\

It could be something else, too, though. Your processor shouldn't be running at 100% for any extended period of time regardless of how much RAM you have.

My guess is you've got a hardware issue. It doesn't mean the motherboard is fried, though. It could be some less important component that's screwing around and trapping the processor in an endless loop. Same thing happened to me a couple years ago, turns out the USB ports were bad, so I disabled them from the BIOS and bought an aftermarket USB card, which solved the problem.

Go into your BIOS and disable all the hardware components you can, reboot, and see if the problem persists. If it doesn't, re-enable each component one-at-a-time until you come across what's causing the problem.

[Spring~Fields]

Originally Posted by kpresidente

If the system.exe is a virus or spyware, just end the process and see if that fixes things. It might come back when you reboot, but at least you'd know what the problem was and you could get a spyware program to clean it up.\

It could be something else, too, though. Your processor shouldn't be running at 100% for any extended period of time regardless of how much RAM you have.

I think that Highlifeman21 told him right about that system.exe.

I did a registry search on this and it is all Microsoft software and nothing is found in the registry or in a files search on the HD called system.exe. There is nothing in the system information either.
I think he has a criter that he doesn't want or need on that computer.

Couldn't that prog. be using the processor and causing it to be running at 100%, of course your correct, it shouldn't be running at 100%

Hope Chip comes back and tells us what he found out, what the cause was and how he resolved it. Might save another some future grief.

[Chip R]

I think I was somewhat mistaken on the system.exe process. It just says System under user name SYSTEM and it's taking up about 85,000 K. I have her on Firefox now so the iexplore.exe processes are gone. So now it's firefox.exe taking up 35,700 K svchost.exe taking up 26,000 K and explorer.exe taking up 20,000 K

She does have cccleaner on here and I did avirus check and system cleaner as Springy suggested. It's still running at 100% and not really running too quickly. I'm going to try the BIOS as kpresidente suggested.

Thanks to everyone for the help.

[Spring~Fields]

Originally Posted by Chip R

I think I was somewhat mistaken on the system.exe process. It just says System under user name SYSTEM and it's taking up about 85,000 K. I have her on Firefox now so the iexplore.exe processes are gone. So now it's firefox.exe taking up 35,700 K svchost.exe taking up 26,000 K and explorer.exe taking up 20,000 K

She does have cccleaner on here and I did avirus check and system cleaner as Springy suggested. It's still running at 100% and not really running too quickly. I'm going to try the BIOS as kpresidente suggested.

Thanks to everyone for the help.

Since the time that you were running that computer, when it ran faster, and between now, have there been any downloads or updates? Has there been any hot fixes etc?

Does the computer have the latest updates as in service packs (SP3) for XP and the hot fixes?

Has the drivers been updated after the service pack 3?

I did some further research on the 100% CPU usage, there were so many examples and answers that I grew weary of looking, but that one above regarding service packs, and hot fixes at Microsoft caught my eye as a possibility. I have had some of there updates do what you have described.

What I got from their information was that some of their issues, might be causing the problem with the computer. They were talking about SP2, and issues and hot fixes that SP3 was to take care of. There probably are updates to even SP3 by now.

You might want to check that above and the drivers updates.

[GAC]

Originally Posted by Chip R

I just checked some programs and The Sims 2 is on there at 1,390 MB. If I didn't know better, I'd say that might be a problem but it won't uninstall and it hasn't been touched in a year.

Sims games are friggin monsters. I know from experience because Rachel loves those games and has them all.

MINIMUM requirements......

First off - your computer better have a capable video card with at least 32 MB of video RAM.

- 800 MHz processor or better
- 256 MB RAM if Windows Vista, XP, Windows ME, Windows 98 or Windows 2000
- At least 3.5 GB of hard drive space

Here are a couple websites that will test your computer and see if it meets the requirements for Sims.....

http://www.simprograms.com/the-sims-...-requirements/

http://compsimgames.about.com/gi/dyn....servopro.com/

[Highlifeman21]

Originally Posted by kpresidente

If the system.exe is a virus or spyware, just end the process and see if that fixes things. It might come back when you reboot, but at least you'd know what the problem was and you could get a spyware program to clean it up.\

It could be something else, too, though. Your processor shouldn't be running at 100% for any extended period of time regardless of how much RAM you have.

My guess is you've got a hardware issue. It doesn't mean the motherboard is fried, though. It could be some less important component that's screwing around and trapping the processor in an endless loop. Same thing happened to me a couple years ago, turns out the USB ports were bad, so I disabled them from the BIOS and bought an aftermarket USB card, which solved the problem.

Go into your BIOS and disable all the hardware components you can, reboot, and see if the problem persists. If it doesn't, re-enable each component one-at-a-time until you come across what's causing the problem.

Sometimes viruses with an exe as a process you cannot stop the process, b/c it'll give you the error message that it's in use and cannot be stopped.

[Highlifeman21]

Originally Posted by Chip R

I think I was somewhat mistaken on the system.exe process. It just says System under user name SYSTEM and it's taking up about 85,000 K. I have her on Firefox now so the iexplore.exe processes are gone. So now it's firefox.exe taking up 35,700 K svchost.exe taking up 26,000 K and explorer.exe taking up 20,000 K

She does have cccleaner on here and I did avirus check and system cleaner as Springy suggested. It's still running at 100% and not really running too quickly. I'm going to try the BIOS as kpresidente suggested.

Thanks to everyone for the help.

That "System" process shouldn't be 85000K, which still leads me to believe it's a virus. My "System" process on my laptop which runs Windows XP is only 240K.

[Chip R]

Originally Posted by Spring~Fields

Since the time that you were running that computer, when it ran faster, and between now, have there been any downloads or updates? Has there been any hot fixes etc?

Does the computer have the latest updates as in service packs (SP3) for XP and the hot fixes?

Has the drivers been updated after the service pack 3?

I did some further research on the 100% CPU usage, there were so many examples and answers that I grew weary of looking, but that one above regarding service packs, and hot fixes at Microsoft caught my eye as a possibility. I have had some of there updates do what you have described.

What I got from their information was that some of their issues, might be causing the problem with the computer. They were talking about SP2, and issues and hot fixes that SP3 was to take care of. There probably are updates to even SP3 by now.

You might want to check that above and the drivers updates.

Thanks. I ran the service pack then updated all the drivers. Only about 6 drivers needed to be updated. I restarted the computer and it's still slow as hell and running at 100%.

I haven't really done anything with the BIOS yet. I did turn off some things like the sound and the network and the keyboard but couldn't get it to test it out. I'm not quite sure how I should do anything with the BIOS.

I did log on to another user she has set up on the computer that's seldom used. It would spike up to 100% but usually stayed down in the single digits. It seemed faster when I logged on to RedsZone and Facebook but not by a great deal.

Originally Posted by Highlifeman21

That "System" process shouldn't be 85000K, which still leads me to believe it's a virus. My "System" process on my laptop which runs Windows XP is only 240K.

"System" is now down to 116 K. I'm going to post a picture of the currently running processes from highest to lowest.