Sluggishness caused by "network solution"?

W

willsteele

New Member
Okay, I've got two XP boxes, both SP2.

Stats on main computer with problems:

Pentium 4 with 1.6G
Total physical memory: 224M (78% utilized)
Total Windows memory: 1095M
Free: 770M
Used: 325M

After my main app computer started getting sluggish due to file size, I caught on and decided to use the second box as a storage device. So, I set up a Linksys G router to run in between and dumped all my files on the 2nd system. I did the regular clean up (disk clean up, defrag) and things worked great for a few days. Now, I find that my original machine is going haywire. The CPU is working at 100% with no applications running at all. I also notice that my regular apps (firefox, desktop weather, etc) began taking a ton of memory. Firefox now uses 26k just to be open. Seems like a high % of memory to me. It also seems, if memory serves correctly, that the memory usage of every application has increased by about 6-8 times across the board. After running Spybot, I found a few minor details (maybe 10 total) to remove. I've dumped all my caches, temp files, etc. No difference.

Two thoughts:

1) I reconfigured something to eat up the memory on running apps (don't know enough to test this theory)
2) someone or something has entered the network through an unprotected router (live in an apartment complex)

Reverting back to unconnected boxes doesn't seem like it would make any difference whatsoever since the only time I used network connections is to share, save or transfer files back and forth between the work device and the storage device.

Any help would be awesome.

Thanks,

Will
 
my first impression is that you have a major virus problem on your system, i would definately perform a virus scan and see what that brings up.
i really couldn't comment on what else could cause such a problem though
 
go to taskmanager and close out of all the admin or user applications. If that doesn't help, you can start closing system processes one at a time and see which one drops the cpu/mem usage the most. My computer had the same problem, the 100%cpu usage, and closing one system process fixed it, but i reinstalled xp sp2 and its all good.

edit: hey just realize...that i had the same post# as hairy lee after i posted this one.
 
I am not sure, off the top of my head, which processes are essential to keeping the gui open. Won't the threads one by one eventually kill my ability to function in the os window?

Also, what other spyware programs would you guys suggest? I did spybot...not the greatest, but free and what I have.
 
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