Hung Process: How do I know?

T

Tycoonbrad

n00b
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Mar 5, 2004
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32
Windows XP SP2

I have two profiles on my Windows XP mine and my wifes. One day I noticed my computer was going REALLY slow. I opened the task manager to check to see what process was hung. Nothing was taking up any of the processing time. That is to say the System Idle was at 00 so there was a problem, but nothing was taking up all the cpu cycles in my task manager. At first, I thought I had a virus. Then I ran my antivirus, Spybot, and Ad-Aware. It was clean. I rebooted several times, and it still seemed slow. THEN...I logged in as my wife and Plextools taking up 100% of the cpu time under HER profile. Even on reboot, it was hanging up.

Since the hung process is on her profile, and doesn't show up in the task manager under my account, how am I suppose to know what the problem is without logging into her account? Suppose I had a couple of profiles for my kids and they had a password. How am I to know where the problem is?
 
Task Manager has a button on the Processes tab that says "Show processes from all users" and by clicking that it should then show every process running on the machine.

Just log into her account, then "Switch User" to your account; you don't need to log her account off, just switch to yours - this is one of the handier features of Windows XP - and the you'll be able to use that button in Task Manager to see what's going on.

Realistically there is no need or reason to have PlexTools running in the background 24/7 - it's just a waste of processor cycles and RAM if you're not actively using it. But then again, I'm betting that your machine probably has a bunch of icons in the System Tray along with the PlexTools icon as well... am I right? :)
 
Thanks bbz_Ghost! That will help tremendously.

I had disabled the plextools on my account, but forgot about it loading on her account. I used msconfig to disable the rest.
 
Whoa there, tiger... I'm assuming you're going to disable only the same things that are disabled or not functional under your profile, right? Lest you incur the wrath of the spouse, you might consider doing that trimming with care in case there's something there in the Tray that she actively uses...

Hope this helps... :D
 
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