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Explorer eating up CPU Cycles

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11 replies

by brianaaa12

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Recently I began having a strange problem. Sometimes, after logging on to my Win98SE box, the machine will appear to lock up. But it's not really locked up because the mouse will move in very small increments. It's clearly busy doing something.
As a test I stuck Wintop in my startup folder. The last time it did this Wintop showed it was Explorer.exe using 95%. It almost always does this for about a minute then everything is normal.
As a side note, I have a folder on my desktop with shortcuts to apps in it. Sometimes it appears that opening this folder triggers the problem because the last 3 or 4 icons don't update like they should. They hesitate until things return to normal. But that may be a symptom and not the cause.
Any ideas?

Brian

11 replies

by 33w shop

This may help. Goto www.download.com and type "regclean" in the search box. Download regclean4.1 and run it. It will clear out any dead links in your registry. It's a small quick program developed by microsoft. It's free too.

This is usuallymy first line of offense dealing with something that isn't "clicking" right in my system.

by shanghai sam

As stated in the prior answer having a nice tight registry is a very good idea. However I'm not sure that would be my first place to look.

Often when I see this problem I face it from four areas in this order:

1. disk health - scandisk
2. file fragmentation - defrag
3. file indexing - find fast
4. viruses
5. startup programs - background processes

The first two are there because often times the user may not be diligent in applying these maintenance features and it is always best to start troubleshooting from as clean a base as possible. Disk problems and big fragmentation can slow down the Windows shell of explorer as it searches around for things or stumbles over transient disk problems.

The third one is an indexing action that occurs as the result of Office 97 installed on the system. The intent was that by indexing all the files they could be found faster. However, the default setting on this generally went through the entire drive and as drives have gotten bigger it became impracticle and annoying. Check your control panel for a Find Fast icon and click on it and disable it. It really is annoyance rather then helpful. If you do have it you can get detailed information about turning it off at the Micrsoft Support Site article Q158705.

by brianaaa12

My scheduler runs Scandisk and Defrag once a week. I only have Systray, Explorer and HotSync running in the BG and always have. I ALWAYS disable FindFast. Garbage. I use McAfee VShield and it updates once a week. Have been using it for a couple years. The problem is about 3 months old.

by pschuvie

finishing above

Viruses/Trojans - there are always these particularly if it is something "recently" and they do by nature tend to grab control and often the delayed cursor is a prime visual clue that something is running that your not aware of. This is more the problem with "always on" internet connections, since many of these are trying to may external site contact and transferring information. So updated, as of today, virus signatures and scan is important. New ones pop up every day it seems.

Lastly is the startup programs and rather then just suggesting turning them off I try to suggest a concerned user such as yourself try to understand what is starting and what it is doing. With so many programs wanting to do something at the start of a session you can have alot of action that if only one program was doing it wouldn't be bad but often it is like rush hour on the freeway. Common culprits are anti-virus, defragmentations, and network/internet connections. Often they want to do something that is intensive that could be modified by looking at the options in the individual programs. Say a virus scanner that is doing the entire C drive rather then just the root and windows directories.

Hope this has been of help.

by gperrie

Have you tried moving the folder with the shortcuts? Could be something not quite right.

Also, is vshield up to date with the engine as well as the DATs, in the past they have released 2 engines pretty close together because they created problems when releasing a new one. Once had a DAT file that was OK on one engine level but ate 99% processor on the previous level.

Gavin

by per johansson

Check what programs that are running in the background and clean them out.
You can also try the solution of disabling Active Desktop and stop using Plus for win98

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