my laptop's CPU kept roaring constantly into the 80% to 100%
range when there were no programs run by me.
The cooling fan would remain on for hours at a time,
the computer would run hot, and the cpu would cycle up into
the 90s constantly and it was driving me crazy.
There were indeed various trojans and malware that
had sneaked onto my computer and my mission was to
find out exactly what
In a fury, I uninstalled the free Avira Antivirus,
and went to war against CPU Hogs.
The result is beautiful success.
Recommendations::
Do NOT use Avira Antivirus -Free; It is not powerful enough and several
rootkits, trojans, and malware shall pass through anyway.
Do NOT use AVG Antivirus; Likewise it is also weak, and several
malwares and trojans, etc., also went undetected.
Do NOT use Kaspersky Internet Security; I tried it and it only
made things worse. The program severely slowed down my
computer to the point where the laptop froze (on the Firefox browser).
So I uninstalled Kaspersky. I thought that because of the awesome
price tag ($59.95) that it would be great; I was wrong.
Do NOT use BitDefender Antivirus or Eset NOD32 AntiVirus as
these are also CPU HOGS, and shall bring up your CPU usage
into the 30% - 50% range, causing your computer to run hot!
In summary, I have decided not to use any resident antivirus protection
at all.
Had great success in using HitMan Pro v35 (not free),
in that it discovered several malwares, a rootkit, and some trojans
which it deleted (upon re-boot).
This is not a resident program, and therefore
it only runs on command, so it does not tax your CPU.
http://www.surfright.nl/en/hitmanpro
Another good program to have installed is Malwarebytes Antimalware,
- the Free version, - no need to install the PRO version.
http://shop.malwarebytes.org/lpa/342/5/ ... gwodmTEY7g
After defeating these malwares,... something was still eating up my
cpu cycles, raising it into the 50%+ range,
so, I did more hunting,...
I TURNED OFF Windows Media Player Network Sharing, this process,
also known as wmpnetwk.exe, would turn on during mysterious times
and eat up system resources, so I nuked it.
I had no need to link up my Windows Media Player to
"external devices", so I did not need this process to come on at all.
Do this: RUN "Services.msc"
In the Standard services list, look for
"Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service",
right-click on it, click on "Properties",
then select Startup Type = Disabled
I TURNED OFF the Windows Search Indexer, also known as
"searchindexer.exe". This annoying
process would turn itself on, constantly
indexing and searching through the hard drive for
apparently no good reason. It would do this for
hours and hours, searching for stuff, but why ?!@#!
SO I disabled it.
In "services.msc", right-click on "Windows Search",
clicked on "Properties" and then clicked on
Startup type = Disabled.
An alternative to using RUN "services.msc" is to install
free versions of EnahnceMySeven & EnhanceMyVista:::
EnhanceMySeven & EnhanceMyVista
http://seriousbit.com/tweak_windows_7/
With those programs you can achieve your goals of
controlling StartUp Items, Processes, Optimizations,
and lots of other special goodies, and you can view a detailed
report of your "system info".
I indicated above that I turned off my Windows file indexer.
A good alternative to file searching would be
ULTRAFILESEARCH (free)
http://www.ultrafilesearch.com/download.html
A list of alternative (& similar) file searchers::
http://alternativeto.net/software/ultra-file-search/
One of the neat things about EnhanceMySeven is the
hard drive monitor,... in my case, the laptop drive has been
running for over a year's worth of hours, and still ticking.
Health rating = 79% (not bad for a 6 year old computer! )
Performance = 17%, (that's kind of sad )
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A very nice program is DiskTective, which
lets you see the megabyte distributions of your
PC directories & files, in piechart form.
In this case, this is what mine looks like:
http://www.disktective.com/
Cool stuff to learn on a grey day...
