High CPU usage (again)

[abastak]

I know this topic has been done before, but nothing I've found on this topic seems to work. So, I'm posting my own thread in hopes of somebody coming up with a fresh thought.

My mother and I have the exact same computer. I bought one for her for christmas when I bought mine. Earlier this year, she had a problem with the computer freezing. I tried several things before reinstalling windows, and finally wiping the drive completely and doing a fresh install. Obviously that fixed the problem.

This may be completely unrelated, but now, several months later, her computer is slowing down. Telling her what to do and where to look for over the phone, she found that explorer.exe is running at 79%.

I had her restart in safe mode and run adaware, spybot, and AVG. All came back clean. Someone on another forum suggested if the explorer.exe wasn't in Windows folder, then it was hijacked, but it is. It is NOT the common AVI problem.

Quite frankly, I'm stumped. The only two things I can think of is that fact that she receives or downloads programs from her friends on Paltalk (which is almost a virus in itself). She's smart enough to not except stuff from ppl she doesn't know, but her friends might be passing along faulty programs unknowningly. My second thought would be there's a bad sector on the disk.

Any other thoughts out there? As I stated, we have the exact same computer, but I dont have any problems with mine. I'd really like to root out the problem so I dont have to go through a backup and reinstall.

Thanks!

 

[DJ-CHRIS]

I will guarntee you it's Paltalk and garbaging up the PC with spyware

AVG doesnt catch all virus's either, and those 2 programs leave out spyware.

And if she by chance has customized spyware, it's best to reinstall. Sounds like some rare or custom spyware

 

[Alvin.C]

Re:

Hello,

Have you maintained a healthy drive by defragging and checkdisks?

 

[Fafnir]

Well sounds like you could have alot of problems. One thing you need to do is personally sit down in front of the computer and not try and do it over the phone. Even for the best computer techs telling people what to do over the phone can get very hairy and alot of stuff can be overlooked. Also try looking for faulty hardware. Even if they are the exact same computer there might have been a problem with manufacturing. Even though it probably isn't a hardware problem you might as well look. Also try running spybot and adaware while not in safe mode. Safe mode won't initialize alot of the spyware when starting up and so your anti-spyware programs may miss them. Either way just sit down in front of it yourself for a hour or so and see what you can see.

 

[idiotec]

I had her restart in safe mode and run adaware, spybot, and AVG. All came back clean.

So adaware and spybot found nothing? That is wierd right there. I have never had adware not find anything.

For virus checking, Trend also has a free online scanner, housecall or something. I would put $10 bucks on virus/spyware. Might be best just to reformat...