Task manager (i think)

[palms]

The problem with our pc is it seems to be scanning a lot and it makes the pc almost impossible to use at times,
we know when the antivirus scans but this is at other times, so i took a look at the task manager and it is completely gone over my head there are things there that have no names just numbers etc is there any place where i can read up on this ( and it needs to be simple ) i am loathe to just start deleting tasks as i dont know what are good ones or bad ones

can anyone offer some advice please

Palms

[HroadhogD1]

I have Googled things in the past to find out what they are, give it a try.

[palms]

Originally Posted by HroadhogD1

I have Googled things in the past to find out what they are, give it a try.

Thanks i do try it usually but i admit today to be a bit confused and lazy

Palms

[mistermonday]

Palms, whenever you see tasks whose names are only numbers, they are usually nasty trojan viruses. I have 2 recommendations for you.
1. There is a really good utility called The Ultimate Troubleshooter (TUT for short) which will display a list of all Tasks, Services, and Startup items and tell you the Mfg name and what they do and allow you to turn them off/on or diisable them. Plus it will display a coplete configuration of your PC (h/w & s/w).
2. Check out NOD32 by ESET. It is the best Antivirus / Anti Malware s/w I have found. Has some new technology, great features, and seems to catch everything.
Good luck cleaning you machine.
Regards, Murray

[palms]

Originally Posted by mistermonday

Palms, whenever you see tasks whose names are only numbers, they are usually nasty trojan viruses. I have 2 recommendations for you.
1. There is a really good utility called The Ultimate Troubleshooter (TUT for short) which will display a list of all Tasks, Services, and Startup items and tell you the Mfg name and what they do and allow you to turn them off/on or diisable them. Plus it will display a coplete configuration of your PC (h/w & s/w).
2. Check out NOD32 by ESET. It is the best Antivirus / Anti Malware s/w I have found. Has some new technology, great features, and seems to catch everything.
Good luck cleaning you machine.
Regards, Murray

Thanks Murray will take a look at them, that is my worry that they could be trojans especially as there seems to be a lot around at the moment

Palms

[pavel123]

I agree that is a bit strange to see numbers there all soft and window services typically have a descriptive name.
Checking your computer with a few additional antivirus programs would be in order. Norton and McCafee used to have an online anrivitus tools. Note that some of the worms could block antivisrus software installation... that is there online tool could come handy. Another option is to manually disable those suspected numbred tasks...disable the files you don't like in task manager, find the file with windows search and change extension from .exe to something else.
It could be, however, that your computer is getting show because it has to much software installed on it and it is either running out of RAM or the reqistry got too big

[mistermonday]

Not sure what antivirus s/w you are currently using but beware of any pop-up that pretends to be your AV s/w when it tells you it has just scanned your PC and found some number of viruses and tells you to click a button for more info. Do not click. That is usually a trojan - many going around now. You can tell by doing a Ctrl+Alt+Del and in the Applications, you will see close to the top of the list a running app that has either just numbers or random letters.
Regards, Murray

[Kraellin]

hi palms,

not quite sure what you mean by 'scanning a lot', but i'm guessing you mean the harddrive light is on and flashing a LOT. and yes, that can make things run slowly. there are a number of things you can try:

1. find Gary. you remember him. he was the computer guru here. i think he works on a fix-it web site. look around in his posts. i know he mentions it somewhere.

2. get "Hijack This". this is a great program for troubleshooting your browser. it's a bit technical, but there's lots of help on the web with folks to help you sort through the results.

3. go to http://www.blackviper.com . this is a great site for letting folks know what they dont need in their computer, especially all the junk that microsoft stuffs in there. he covers many versions of windows and knows his stuff pretty darn well.

4. increase your swap file in windows. lots of times, if your ram gets filled, the harddrive is kicked in to serve as more ram. it's quite a bit slower than ram and the harddrive light will blink furiously. this may not help a lot, but it might help a bit.

5. increase the amount of ram in your system. if you have xp, 32 bit, you can increase it up to 3 gigs max. if you have vista or win7, 64 bit, you can increase it ... a big freaking number (sorry, i run out of toes and fingers on this one). i've currently got 6 gigs in mine, but have room for 12 on this motherboard.

6. active scanning programs are a pain in the... harddrive. most allow you to turn off the active scanning portion. i wont tell you that you dont need this active part, but i dont allow any on my rigs unless i know i'm going to be going to some site i dont really know or trust and then i may turn these back on. downloads too. turn them on for downloads if you dont know much about the program, the site, or who you're getting it from.

7. get "WinPatrol". this is a rather incredible little program that monitors stuff that wants to go in your Windows startup spaces and alerts you to these and then kills them if you dont want them running. it's saved my butt many times! a VERY must have program!

8. find Gary!

9. in lieu of finding Gary, find someone that looks like him

10. re-read 1 through 9.

11. do a de-frag on your harddrive.

12. flush all your temp files, especially the 'internet temp' files.

13. try to isolate where the problem is coming from. does it only happen when you run photoshop, your browser, or whatever.

14. did i mention finding Gary?

15. do a registry cleaning. it's amazing how much junk can end up there and not be attached to anything any more. just be sure you make a backup first!

16. if you have a very large photo library, the cache on this can take a long time to load when you run paint shop pro, photoshop or any other program that loads your pics for you. consider offloading a bunch of these to a cd/dvd or just taking them out of the cache startup for those programs.

[palms]

Thanks you all for the advice given
I have started to do some scans etc (tried spybot last night and cleaning up a few things)
Murray i know of two people who have clicked those boxes and both had nasty trojans ( one was the young son, so parents drum into the kids not to click them)
Craig, You understand me ! that is what i mean
I dont keep photo's on the hard drive i put them more or less straight onto disc, and neither do i have a lot of software, ps brushes actions etc ( they go on a portable hard drive)
do you think i should find Gary ?:grin
the pc runs fine in between these "scan" things so i think that is where we must look and try to work out what is what so will look at the software/pages you have all mentioned
and i will look for Gary (Richardson) on the net that is wont go trawling the uk to find him

Thanks again

Palms

[HroadhogD1]

There is a free program that I have had good luck with. It is called Malwarebytes anti-malware. Download it and run a scan. You might find and if infected get rid of it with this.

There is another program (this is free too) ccleaner it will delete temp files.

[palms]

Thank you again
still looking through things having a tidy up and googling some of the entries ( surprising how many of them are windows ! ! ! ! )

any way found Gary this is where he is hanging out
will trawl through some more stuff and then if need be i will go get him ! ! ! ! !

Palms

[bpurvis]

I'm glad I clicked on this thread. My computer has slowed down quite a bit too. I had no idea that photo files and brushes and stuff could slow you down so much. I'll have to figure this out. I have a secondary hard drive to back files up in case of crash, but if I remove the files from my hard drive, they won't really be backed up. Guess I could burn them to disk, but I'm often adding to or working on different ones. I'll have to think about this.
Becky

[palms]

Originally Posted by bpurvis

I'm glad I clicked on this thread. My computer has slowed down quite a bit too. I had no idea that photo files and brushes and stuff could slow you down so much. I'll have to figure this out. I have a secondary hard drive to back files up in case of crash, but if I remove the files from my hard drive, they won't really be backed up. Guess I could burn them to disk, but I'm often adding to or working on different ones. I'll have to think about this.
Becky

I put my brushes, actions,textures,plug ins etc on to my portable drive and back them up onto disc (which i leave open so that i can add to it )

Photographs i put onto discs like by year or event etc but then also put them all onto a another disc as a backup ( again leaving open so that i can add too it till it is full )

makes for a boring hour or two but a job worth doing
oh and i dont clear my camera memory till i have done the discs

there might be a better way but havent worked one out yet !
and just to be even more boring i have a few discs with every image that i have ever posted here ! ! ! ! ! !

Palms

[zakum]

Thanks a lot for the `Black Viper` link, great site

[bpurvis]

Hmmm... I never thought of backing up brushes and stuff like that, but on the other hand it would be horrible to lose everything. It's probably time to do a good back up again. I have most of my photos burned to disk, but like to be able to access them so I can "play" with them when the mood hits. I'll have to take all but the most favorites off my hard drive to clear some room.

Can I ask what kind of a portable drive you use? I have a western digital from several years ago, but just use if for back ups - I don't leave it permanently connected. It ran all the time and I heard that they tended to die frequently so I wanted to extend it's life.

[palms]

Originally Posted by bpurvis

Hmmm... I never thought of backing up brushes and stuff like that, but on the other hand it would be horrible to lose everything. It's probably time to do a good back up again. I have most of my photos burned to disk, but like to be able to access them so I can "play" with them when the mood hits. I'll have to take all but the most favorites off my hard drive to clear some room.

Can I ask what kind of a portable drive you use? I have a western digital from several years ago, but just use if for back ups - I don't leave it permanently connected. It ran all the time and I heard that they tended to die frequently so I wanted to extend it's life.

my portable hd is a iomega 250gb and i only plug it in when i need it, i find it much better than having to find the right disc, load it etc etc although i do keep a rough list at hand as to what is on there
Palms

[Kraellin]

i shld point out that photos dont normally auto-load with photoshop, unless there is some internal tool that does this. normally, your caches load when you load the program. this is to make the startup of that program faster. on my other computer i have so many photos in my paint shop pro folders that it takes almost five minutes to fully load psp and have it 'settle down', and that's after removing some of the folders from the load.

however, i doubt this is what's causing your problem. this sounds more like auto-scan or auto-updater. some anti-malware programs like spybot have a very strong and very active feature which aggressively 'hunt down' malware. this particular feature of spybot can be turned off for a more passive protection. it's up to you.

and, with so many programs now doing auto-updates, this could also be going on. adobe, corel, adobe reader, flash, anti-virus programs and others, not to even mention Windows itself, and you could see a lot of harddrive activity going on when you dont really know why. this is also why you want to spend a little time on blackviper to find out what services and applications and so on are actually running on your machine and what they mean and if you can live without them. i allow very few auto-updates. it's just annoying as hell to be working on something and up pops some warning or window requiring your attention or the harddrive is going mad and you dont know why. so, i leave most of them off or, i schedule the updates for a time when i wont be working but the computer is on.

so, do be aware of the possibility of a virus/trojan/malware of some sort, but dont get too alarmed every time the drive goes on. windows shld actually have a feature on the right side bar in win7 and vista for telling you when something is auto-updating. might save some headaches. or maybe firewalls could incorporate this?

[Nasturtium]

I hate to say this but when my PC starts acting like this it's time to upgrade. Just sayin'. Seems to happen about every 2-4 years. :-(

[palms]

Craig thanks again will be looking at blackviper soon just been taking a look and learning things on the pc as i go along had a tidy up, scanned using windows defender/spybot etc the pc defrags everyweek, moved the scan time for the av till later when there is less chance of using the pc, stopped a few things at start up (probably could stop a few more )

looked up a lot of the tasks that are listed in the task manager and a fair few of them are windows based, one turned out to be Mcaffee ( how as we have never used it ?) just got to pluck up the courage to disable it
still have some that are numbers only ! !

I think it could well be a bit of everything just needs more tlc than we have been giving it ( wished windows 98 was still usable just used to get out the disc, clear the lot and start all over again )

Nasturtium a bit of wishful thinking a upgrade this one hasnt earn't its keep just yet And I think a better answer would be for me and DH to have our own pc ! ! ! ! !

Palms

[TommyO]

Palms1,

While it appears you have some cleanup to do in your startup programs and services, there is another often overlooked Windows option that eats more CPU time the more files that exist on the hard drive(s).

It is called "indexing". It is used to build caches about file properties, so that disk searches will go faster. Unfortunately, as we increase the number of files, the indexing service gets slower and slower and larger and larger.

You can access it from the "properties" dialog in Windows Explorer. Just open "My Computer", right click on your first drive letter, click properties. At the bottom of the properties dialog, you'll see a check box for "allow indexing service to index this drive for fast file searching". You can uncheck this with no harm done. And, you'll notice hardly any difference in your file searching. Once, unchecked, you'll be prompted to turn off indexing for the root, or all sub-directories. Pick all sub-directories. Then, go watch some TV, as it will take a while if your drive is large. Later, do this for your next drive letter as well.

By default, I turn this off on every computer I set up, even for friends and family. It makes that much difference on overall speed.

But, be sure to fix the other issues as well. They will only get worse over time.

[bpurvis]

I turned off indexing and my pc got considerably faster. Isn't it amazing the difference the little things will make? Thank you Tommy!

[bpurvis]

I swear, my computer's on speed! I'm going to do some of the other things mentioned above, but it was amazing how blazingly fast it is now that indexing is turned off. Wow!
Becky

[Kraellin]

you're welcome, palms and like i said, regarding those files with numbers as names, find gary