Identifying Resource Hogs

[ScottInTexas]

Is there anything I can use to identify the exact cause of the loss of my resources? For example, that first sentence took a couple of seconds to write, but I had to wait for the letters to appear. My disk access indicator is not on all that much. I checked start up to make sure nothing snuck in. The system is just REAL slow. I am scared to death of doing a complete restore. I have Carbonite, so I'm not worried about my files, well, most of them, anyway. I'm sure that I will lose something along the way, but wont know what until I need it. At that point it will be the most important file I had.

Dell Vostro 1510
Widows XP Pro SP3
20Gb free space on the hard drive
2Gb RAM

Thanks

[Spookster]

When you look at the task manager on the performance tab are you low on memory or is the CPU being maxed out?

[ScottInTexas]

The CPU is peaking at around 98% and RAM is running about 50% (that being the system cache).

[oracleguy]

Go to the process tab, is there one process that is using up most of the CPU continuously? If so, what is it?

[Spookster]

Once you identify which process is eating up the CPU it should be relatively easy to resolve. If the process is one of the svchost.exe's that Microsoft runs then you may want to install an application called Process Explorer that will allow you to see what processes are being bundled inside it to determine which one might be causing a problem.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

[ScottInTexas]

Well, there are a lot of processes. I see several in the 20Mb range, Firefox at 175Mb, search indexer at 47Mb (which I stopped). But therein lies the problem. Some of them are named so stupidly that you have no idea what they are. For example, RTHDCPL.EXE as 23.5 Mb. And what's this plugin-container.exe? BTW, I'm showing processes from all users (CPU usage at 100% right now) so I can get everything that might be anything. (CPU down to 50%). SBAMsvc.exe Is it just me or should we all hate Windows?

[oracleguy]

The problem sounds like something is hogging all the CPU time, not a memory problem. What processes were using up the CPU? Your post didn't make it clear.

As for the cryptic process names, Windows isn't the only OS that has that problem. For most processes though you can google the name and find out what it is. Like RTHDCPL.EXE appears to be the Realtek HD Audio Sound Effect Manager.

[ScottInTexas]

I guess I just have to go to the web for each one and see what it is and why it is running. Since this just recently started to be a problem it has to be something new. I haven't installed any new software so I was thinking it is some sort of malware. But both my antivirus and anti malware programs came up empty. I have even gone back to an earlier checkpoint and it didn't make any difference. I'm almost at the point of doing the whole restore thing. AHHHHHHH!