Fire Alarms Systems

Nigel Tasker PC may stop working for up to 10 minutes due to the hard drive activity, so what can you do about it?

The hard drive on my Windows XP desktop PC (not connected to the Internet, so that nothing has slipped in) began to struggle for a maximum of 10 commissioning minutes, and thereafter is very slow.

Nigel Tasker

A relatively common problem with Microsoft Windows XP is that you can paralyzed when there is a kind of runaway process that uses more than 80% of the hard drive or 100% CPU. Generally, everything else is frozen until the process stops thugs.

unfortunately, is a very unpredictable. A PC can run perfectly for years before starting to misbehave for no apparent reason, perhaps because many files were updated in the background. Your PC may, of course, has a virus or other malware infection, which is a very good reason to try to identify the problem. But more often both a cause and cure are buried somewhere deep in the operating system where most people prefer not to go.

In general, the authors tend to be drivers or antivirus programs and firewalls. They are those who (unlike applications) operate at low levels in the operating system, and not always follow the rules of Windows programming. The systematic approach is to uninstall all your anti-malware software, update the drivers, and then use the previous configuration of XP to a "diagnostic startup". The fastest way to run the System Configuration Utility by clicking Start, select Run, type msconfig in the box and click OK or press Enter either.

If your PC works fine with only the operating system to load essential files - must, if you have 2 GB memory 1 GB or more and less free space on the hard drive - then use tab to remove all the extras, and add them one by one until you find the culprit. This involves many restarts and is therefore overwhelming annoying that I have never done. Many processes running in Windows XP should be obvious from their names, as iexplore.exe and winword.exe, but you may need to perform an Internet search to identify other part.

Sysinternals (which was bought by Microsoft) provides a better value: Process Explorer. It's like an improved version of Task Manager. It has graphics on top to show memory, disk and network usage, but you must go through the same routine before adding columns of bytes read and write bytes. Again, this should allow you to see what is striking on the hard disk.

However, the usefulness of much help to solve these problems is, in my experience, AnVir Task Manager Free. This replaces the Microsoft, both the system configuration - can be used to remove startup programs and other unwanted services - and the Windows Task Manager. Your Processes tab now has columns for CPU load and disk, so just click on the disc loading section to see all programs that use the hard drive is sorted to the top of the page.

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