Dollie wrote:
>I have a Dell Pentium III and in Task Manager, Processes, explorer.exe is
>using almost all the cpu, the curser jumps around like it gets stuck. I
>am trying to get AVG Anti-virus and Anti-spyware on it to see if there is
>a problem and it is taking forever. Does anybody have any ideas?
It's impossible to say, without a lot more info. the range of possibilities
is enormous.
Best-case scenario: You have too many programs running at startup, and/or
too little memory installed for whatever system you are running.
Worstcase scenario: If you have been on broadband internet without any
anti-virus or anti-spyware protection, it's highly probable that your
computer has been compromised by net nasties that the only practical remedy
is a complete reformat of your hard drive. Some of the more sophisticated
viruses and malware are able to prevent installation of defensive measures
once they have access to your computer. The average time for an unprotected
computer to be hacked in some form is, I believe, less than 3 minutes.
It's even possible that your computer has been "zombied". That is, it has
been taken over by a spammer which is sending out 1000's of email spam from
your computer's address. The only sign you would see of this is exactly
what you are seeing---the computer's entire resources are being used by
this process. Otherwise, the entire procedure is totally invisible to you
without specialised tools and/or knowledge. Your firewall event logs might
show something, if you have a good firewall such as Zone Alarm Pro.
Sorry to sound so dismal, but those are the range of
possibilities. Hopefully, your problem may lie somewhere between these
extremes. (eg software/hardware conflicts, faulty memory, bad or overfull
hard drive, etc).
If you can give us a lot more info about your system, when the problem
started, whether it's been gradual or sudden, etc, then you may get more
informed answers. How old is the computer, and when was the hard drive last
reformatted?
If XP, have you tried System Restore? Do you have enough RAM to run it
properly?
Don Penlington
From the Beach at Surfers Paradise in sunny Queensland.
Computer tutorials, local scenery, and other things at my website:
http://users.tpg.com.au/deepend/index1.html
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