Re: Whats my processor doing ?

Joco wrote:
Daniel hi and thanks for your reply.
I have a WD 500GB My Book Premium 1C external drive which I use for backing up my PC and Laptop.
I have already tried the Task Manager, that did not help.
I have installed and run reguarly "Windows Defender", "NoAdware", "RegistryFix", and "Regseeker", however I will try the software you mentioned (Spybot Destroyer and Ad-Aware)
Once again thanks for your assistance
Joco (London)

"Daniel Crichton" wrote:

Joco wrote on Tue, 19 Jun 2007 03:48:01 -0700:

Hi
My processor is busy beavering away, and I have no clue to what its
actually doing.
Is there a simple way of knowing what program is running, the task manager
does not help or give any clues. I have tried whats running, but this
gives me an endless list, prseumable created from the start program.
The sound from the processor would suggest a defragmentation program was
running, whilst I have O&O defragmentation it is not scheduled to run at
this time either by me setting a time or default.
Is there a simple utility programe which will give me the names of
programes actually running ? my operatingI system is windows XP SP2
Thanks Joco (London)
Processors do not make a noise. That will be your hard disk.

It could just be an issue with fragmentation on the drive, especially if you paging file is fragmented as when you have a lot of programs running chunks of memory will be swapped out to disk into the paging file.

To see what's running, bring up Task Manager (right click on the taskbar and choose Task Manager). Look for any programs with high CPU or memory usage.

You might want to run some malware scans (such as Spybot Destroyer and Ad-Aware) and see what turns up.

It's also possible that your hard drive is on it's way out, I'd suggest backing up anything you want to keep just in case. While I might be wrong, there's nothing worse than having the hard drive suddenly break down due to a mechanical failure and finding you'll have to pay through the nose to get a data recovery company to get back files that you haven't backed up and really need.

Dan




Hi Joco,

Both TaskManager and What's Running will answer your question. I think the problem may be that you don't understand 'what' the answer means.

In simplest terms, when you are not running any applications, you may think that the computer is not doing anything. In reality, it is doing quite a few things. That is why you see that long list in What's Running. Just waiting for the 'user' to tell the machine to do something is doing something. If you have an Internet connection, than the computer has to be in contact with the network. If you are listening to music, the computer is reading the mp3 and playing it. Your screen is being refreshed (even though you haven't made any changes).

One of the things that you will notice in TaskManager is that there are a couple of different tabs. The 'Applications' tab tells you what applications you are running. If you click on the 'Processes' tab, you will see all the things your computer is doing in the background. If you have a lot of processes running, even though no applications are running, you can be using the CPU and hard disk.

Unfortunately these days, quite a few programs will install processes without the user even knowing it. All the user knows is that over a period of time there computer seems to have gotten slower. Because I do a lot of software testing, I try to check my computer at least once a month to see what is actually going on, on my computer.

Not only does some software install processes, some ill-behaved ones when you uninstall them don't remove everything they installed.

If you are in the habit of downloading shareware & freeware, that threat of 'unmentioned' processes increases.

Ciao . . . C.Joseph

"A promise is nothing more than an attempt,
to respond to an unreasonable request."
.

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