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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