I am at a loss. I have a 2 months old desktop PC (CPU AMD Sempron 3100+, Asrock board) with XP Pro SP 2 installed. It has been running perfectly, but a couple of days ago my wife got ahold of it and ever since it has been EXTREMELY slow.

The only thing my wife did was to plug in a Siemens wireless access point to our adsl switch to which both our laptop and our desktop is connected. I don't know if this has any bearing on what has happened to my desktop, but everything has been unplugged and started up again, but the situation is still the same. Other than that nothing major has been changed on the desktop other than a couple of screensaver downloads from Planetsoft a little week before my desktop grew slow over night.

When I look at the joblist (ctrl+alt+delete), the CPU usage is 100%!
2 processes are taking up CPU time: hot_plug.exe (CPU 20) and services.exe (CPU 70-90). Services.exe is a system critial resource and cannot not be closed.

I have been running up-to-date Norton antivirus, ZoneAlarm firewall, Ad-aware and Spybot, but none of this programs finds any irregularities on the machine.

Any help to fix this problem, will be highly appreciated.

Kind regards Lastmo

Kindly post your hijackthis log in the viruses, spyware and nasties forum.

Reinstall Windows :D

As a more general question what should be running? Obviously if I have explorer or mozilla open, I should see that in the process list. But how does one determine what processed SHOULD be there and which should not? Frequently I'll leave my computer inactive only to return to find my CPU running at 100%. Can I find a descriptive list of the processes and their function?

the list would depend upon the applications yyou would have installed on the PC. By the way wat is the Hot_Plug.exe for? Is it something that you might have installed or some spyware or malware.

Raj

you probably have spyware, that's why I never get those stupid screensavers or stupid things like that on the internet.

2005!

>2005!

what?

The actual thread start date is 2005. Weird....it was continued by one of the users for their own query not the original one.

Raj

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