A few times a day my computer is clicking/chattering away like it’s as busy as can be, and when it’s doing that it’s super slow in doing anything I want it to do. How can I find out what it’s doing during these incidents?
It appears to me that whatever it’s doing doesn’t show up on Task Manager, even though “Show processes from all users” is checked. Sometimes the memory usage doesn’t show much over 10,000 on anything even while it’s chattering away and running really slow. Why is it that this busyness doesn’t register there, or at least doesn’t appear to register there?
I have an old Compaq tower unit running Windows XP. I can provide more info if you can guide me in how to find it.
Any enlightening info, questions, or tips are most welcome. Thanks.
Task manager in XP only shows you memory load and CPU time. if no process is taking much CPU time when you sort that column, then it’s probably something taking up disk I/O. Malware scanners, indexers, and so on can do that. They’re keeping the hard drive busy but not taking much memory or CPU.
unfortunately XP doesn’t have as rich a resource monitor as 7 or 8, but it might help you get a handle on what is doing what:
Sometimes what’s at fault here is a combination of too little RAM (or, at least, not a lot) and Windows prefetch/superfetch utility. These try to predict what programs you use and keep them preloaded for faster responses. They’re smart enough to even guess at what time of the day you use applications, so sometimes they’ll start juggling what’s in memory even if it seems like you haven’t done anything to cause that. They’re only supposed to use idle time in the background, but that isn’t always my experience.
But it could also be any number of scanner/checker/updater type processes running in the background. DropBox used to be a big culprit when I had it installed.
You might want to check out Process Monitor. It says it runs on Windows XP SP2 and higher. It will show you file events by process. That will give you an idea of what the disk intensive culprit(s) are when if you are tracking during the slow downs.