My computer keeps freezing for 10secs - thats a bad sign isn't it?

[SleighlyMadSanta]

Its doing it every couple of minutes....its bad isn't it?

[Kevlarhead]

Yep.

When your machine freezes, I'm guessing that one particular process/program is jumping in and hogging all the processing time.

If you're running windows, press Ctrl-Alt-Delete to bring up the task manager.

In the task manager, goto the Processes tab. This will show you a list of all processes currently running on your machine, along with who's running them, how much memory they use, and a few other things.

I'd suggest you click on the CPU header at the top of the processes list. This will sort the list of processes by the % of computer's processing time they take up. You might need to click it a couple of times to get the list sort in descending order.

If you watch the list of processes, you should see the name of the process/program responsible appearing at the head of the list when your machine freezes. Take a note of its name, and google it. This should bring up a list of web pages which keep a list of what different process names are, what they do, and what programs they're associated with.

From there you can decide if the reason it's freezing is beacuse of spyware (kill it!) or some other program that you installed intentionally, and decide what steps to take from there.

[SleighlyMadSanta]

Many thanks...I have got my task manager up and have been watching the spikes over a few days and it deffo spikes before it freezes, but takes a while to recover after the CPU usage has gone back down. I will try checking which one is causing the spikes and investigate from there.

It seems to have come on suddenly. About a week ago we left the computer (to go to loo) and when we returned the screen was completely black - could do nothing except power off.

When we rebooted it would do very little but was fine second time we rebooted - except it has been doing this ever since. It is worse for hte first 20-30mins after start-up.

Also I have to say that I am using a different user profile in XP now and it seems to be working pretty smoothly.

[SleighlyMadSanta]

There are 69 process in teh list though which I thought was pretty high...I must look as I am sure they are not all needed.

The highest CPU usage under baseline conditions seems to be "System Idle Process" at 90-97

[Kevlarhead]

My machine runs Windows XP, hasn't been reinstalled in ages and has all kinds of unecessary rubbish installed, clogging the memory and taking up processor time.

Having said that, I only appear to have 50 processes running, so I'd suggest looking into pruning some of what's running in the background.