Dear How To
I am a fan of the great info you send me daily and so i thought you folk could help.

Could some one be accessing my computer resources?
After 8pm, whether i am at my office or at home, my computers work very slowly, such that i could click a link or command in an application, go to the toilet and return still waiting for the screen to respond.
Typically i am at the computers from waking to going to bed. At work that means 8:30am to 9pm. On my home computer, any time after 8pm, i will begin hearing a sound i relate to the drive searching similar to the activity i might hear when activating a system scan by my antivirus (I hope you get what i mean). When he system is first in operation all i hear for the first few hours is the fans and then after some hours, things just slow down. If anti virus is doing a scan i will stop it however, the Vipre AV is seldom the cause of the freezing and crashing of programs.

My habit is to turn off and reboot the computers when this begins but its not much help late at night. could my computer be part of some giant scheme to access millions of computer's resources in a nefarious scheme requiring huge computing power or is it just my paranoia and the god tellig me to get a life. None the less, I need it to stop as i have work to do.

I am a fan of the great info you send me daily and so i thought you folk could help.

Work Computer:
Dell Optiplex170L, 2.8GHz pentium 4, 512MB Memory
Verizon DSL

Home computer:
HP Presario, 3500 AMD Athlon64, 512MB memory,
Road Runner Cable

Hi Scott,
I have morning and evening print screens of my Task Manager. How do i post them?

Walterose

Do you have the same antivirus software installed on both machines? It could be that they are running scheduled scans.

Scott,
Cool stuff. Here are th eTask Manager Images
4 pictures. 2 (upper and lower screen) of taskmanager 4 hours after computer was turned on. Final 2 of Taskmanager, late niterounf 11pm.

-(1)-

-(2)-

-(3)-

-(4)-

Walterose,

While new member IshKapila may be absolutely correct, it's unlikely you have more than
one scheduled task set to run at 8pm, but lets find out for sure. If you can open
Task Scheduler we can be certain. Have a look around for daily and weekly tasks.
In addition, you hvae way too many programs starting with your machine.

If you download and run a small program by Microsoft called 'Autoruns',
we can check what items start-up and even see your tasks.

http://technet.microsoft.com/e.....63902.aspx

Ok. I have run the program. There is a lot of stuff there.
I feel like i have stepped off the beach and into the middle of the ocean.
I counted 950 items under the "everything" tab
Ishkapila, there are 4 scheduled items.
I cant even see land form where i am.
Please tell me what direction to swim in.
Obviously (to me at least) i don't want to screw up my system more than it already is.
Most items are in the registry. As long as i know what buttons to push i am game.

Walterose

Hi Walterose, you should make sure you can't salvage it first (re-install of the OS, etc.). If not, see if you can rob the RAM out it and fire it into your other PC. THEN you should ensure your hard disc is either wiped properly or hit with a hammer. (Just thinking you might have sensitive info on it if its your work HD). I'm not too clued up on wiping hard drives, but I've seen this bandied about a bit. Maybe someone can tell if this is any use?

Cheers,
Col

Walterrose, would you be so kind as to print the programs
listed in the Logon tab from within Autoruns? While you're
there may as well print the Scheduled Tasks tab as well.

Wow. OK, here is what I would do in this situation.

Time your boot from power on to you get to your desktop. I'd guess 90-180 seconds.
Start unchecking some of these apps. You aren't deleting these programs, just stopping them from starting with your computer.

-anything Apple
-Google update
-ctfmon.exe (may have to be disabled from Control Panel)
-Sunjavaupdate (Juscked.exe, see http://www.howtogeek.com/howto.....t-running/) I believe this works in XP too.

Reboot and time how long it takes to get to your desktop. More unchecks to come.....

@ Raven, same one