What the heck is my PC doing? Tuesday, December 19, 2006
These days I run very few foreground desktop applications other than a browser and perhaps Powerpoint. In addition, I have a number of background applications such as skype, google desktop, norton, AVG and Zone Alarm running.
However, I'm regularly frustrated by my laptop/desktop "wandering" off doing something undirected and slowing the machine down - CPU thrashes away, hard disk whirls. Looking at the Windows Task Manager is no help either; tens of processes about which I've no idea what they purport to be doing eating memory/CPU.
Killing these processes off always seems so tempting but who knows what that might do - could be an important process! So I'm contemplating installing a piece of freeware entitled ProcessLibrary which seeks to demistify what all these processes are, and provide an importance ranking. Hopefully this may allow me a little more insight into what is actually superfluous.
posted by John Wilson @ 11:05 PM Permanent Link
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1 Comments:
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At 5:45 PM,
said...
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John, I just chanced to see this post recently - I can't vouch for it (or the writer) but there may be some relevant resources there for you to check out:
http://scrappyuntechie.blogspot.com/2006/12/shut-down-stuff-that-slows-your-pc.html
Having lots of memory should prevent swapping - I thoroughly recommend it. It will also save you fuffing about trying to save some cycles.
Oh, one other thing: if you're running Firefox for days-on-end, it might help to restart it more frequently. Firefox has a subtle memory leak in Macs - that may not apply to PCs.
Good luck!
Harry
