New User Blues

[bathrick]

Over the past few months I have been having problems with my CPU usage running wild.  I am running Win2k and regularly use Outlook 2002, Firefox, AVG and Auction Sentry.  The hesitation and networking failures caused (I believe) by the CPU utilization had really become a problem.  (I have not upgraded this machine because of a piece of software on it that is vital to my operation and does not work on the next version of Windows).

I was thrilled to find Process Lasso - I thought it would be exactly what I needed to get my computer back under control.  I installed it and - unfortunately - it looks like the machine is running poorer than before.  I have on several occasions seen Process Lasso itself hit 100% CPU.

I use VNC as a remote management tool.  My connection drops on average every minute.  I can not keep my remote SQL connection active because of networking drops.  These networking issues seem to be directly correlated with high (>100%) CPU usage.

Have I done something wrong here?  Is there a place I can look to tweak this so that things work a little smoother?  Or am I asking PL to do something it is not desgned to do and should look for another program.

Mike

[bathrick]

Hi guys, any tips?

[Jeremy Collake]

It sounds as if you're in a situation that Process Lasso can't help with. From your description, I believe there is a lot of kernel mode CPU utilization. In other words, some low level software on your computer is performing badly. The usual culprit is your anti-virus/anti-malware (AVG) software's on-access file scanning. Similarly, any network filtering done by these products may slow down your network performance.

Try completely disabling AVG on your system. If that doesn't help, try uninstalling it (you can always reinstall it later).

Of course, its also possible you have malware or something else on your system that is causing such poor performance. I'm assuming your system once performed better, so you know the cause is probably software introduced onto the system. I'm sure you've already tried the usual maintenance such as disk defragmentation and registry cleaning.