"system" process is growing...

[Battalion23]

Hey. Noticed my notebook getting a little sluggish. checked the processes in task manager and saw that the "system" process is taking up the most processing power... roughly about 51,000Kb (isn't suppose to take up just 200K ? ) , and this week it's at 64,000K. I didn't check the growth rate... but I'm sure it's something very wrong.
updated AVG free, spyware terminator, pc firewall plus, also downloaded and ran Avira & ad aware ... nothing worked.
any suggestions? before I have to format and reinstall?
PLEASE HELP.
Thanks.

 

[mpilchfamily]

If a single prosses is taking up all the CPU cycles then you may want to figure out what that prosses is for and weather or not its an important proccess. Its common for system prosses to use upwards of 50k to 100k. Thats only a few megs so its not a big deal. But if the CPU cycles are somewhere otehr then the system idle when the system is idleing then you may have a problem.

If your running XP it will get sluggish over time due to access and leftover data building up and getting in the way. Its good to reinstall XP every once in a while to help clean things up.

Almost forgot. The memory those prosses are using is the virtual memory and not the actual RAM.

 

[Battalion23]

Thanks for replying.
The process is that "system" process. I can't shut it down... but something is actually growing. now, it's 64,304K...
I'm sure it's some kind of maleware... just don't know how to remove it... I just installed XP 6 months ago... I'm trying to avoid doing it all again...

 

[mpilchfamily]

How about naming the prosses. There are several types of malware that cause the svchost.exe to take up all of the CPU. So look in the task manager and name off which one of the processes you think is the problem. It could just be a background program like the task bar or maybe even an explorer addon like the google or yahoo task bar. Often those contribute to system slowdowns.

 

[Battalion23]

I'm talking about the actual "system" process... that one... just that one. all the rest are fine, more or less the same, but "system" is the growing one. I'm @ work right now, checked all the computers here, "system" process is using 220K, and back home , mine is taking up 64,304K (last time I checked)...