I am running an HP Pavilion dv9700 notebook with an AMD TurionX2 processor, 2Gb RAM and a 250gb disk. OS is Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 – upgraded from Vista Home Premium. Just recently it has been behaving very oddly when carrying out file operations using Windows Explorer.
i have been trying to delete and/or copy reasonably large numbers of files and have done this, as I always have, by highlighting the file or files I want and then pressing Delete/Ctrl+C/ctrl+V, or equivalent commands from the right click context menu. Sometimes it will carry out these commands okay. Howeveer on rather more occasions it will display a dialgue box saying something like “…Discovering items….” at which point processor usage shoots up to 100%, the processor fan starts running faster and faster and nothing else actually happens until the PC crashes. If I kill Explorer using Task Manager (after telling me that Explorer is not responding) processor usage drops back to more normal levels and the fan quietens down.
I have run virus scans (NIS2011), Malware Bytes and used Process Explorer to look for rogue or unidentified processes, all to no avail. I can find nothing obviously untoward but notice that even with no applications running, Explorer is using around 50-60% processor. It will continue to do this (whilst apparently achieving nothing) until the PC just switches itself off.
This behaviour is making the PC virtually unusable. Can anyone suggest what might be causing this and how to fix it please?