Windows 7 Cleanup?

[Ninjahedge]

Hey guys.

My wife's machine is running as slow as molasses at the DMV.

Any clues on scanners/sites that could recommend some things to ditch/uninstall to get this puppy moving again?

[Dr. Death]

What's using the CPU/Memory? Can the machine access the internet? What applications/aspects of the machine are slow? Why am I doing their IT department's job?

[Ninjahedge]

Because I am "their IT department". ;)

My wife's laptop is a home machine. She has been laid off since February!


As for memory, some of the svchost incidents were getting VERY large, even when all of the visible programs were stopped.

The problem is, there were so many different proggies running in the TaskManager that I did not know where to start (especially in W7). What program (HJT?) would facilitate a scanning/cleaning of her machine?

[Dr. Death]

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

It's a more robust task manager and will tell you what's running in all those svchost processes.

In both programs (ProcExp and Task manager) you can sort by the CPU usage column and find out what processes are hogging the CPU resources.

[Ninjahedge]

I was looking through and saw a lot of resources being taken by the smartpad controller (the laptop touchpad). This was not the case when we first got it.

It seems like there is always something going on in the background and the usual "look by CPU usage" thing was not working too well (Or by reads/writes, Peak Mem, VM or Memory, although all gave inklings to what was using what).

The TM has about 50 things running on it and that seems extremely excessive for a new-boot.

Thanks for the link DD. I will have to check it out!

[Dr. Death]

My win7 laptop has 89 processes when I click "Show processes from all users." All I've got going is MSN, Firefox, IE, Eclipse, and about 8 taskbar icons.

I don't really think 50 is excessive.

[Ninjahedge]

Thanks. It is just a lot more than the old XP.....