I've just had a strange event on my laptop. I noticed that it had become sluggish, the hard drive access light was on a lot and the fan was running continuously and fast (most unusual).
I opened Task Manager and noticed about a dozen instances of cmd.exe and ping.exe using a lot of CPU cycles. The performance tab showed very high CPU and hard drive utilisation. Something was very wrong! I had vivsions of having to reformat the disk and reinstall everything.
I started a complete scan using my security suite (Comodo) which, of course, didn't help speed the system up. In fact, it took 3 hours to scan 20% of my drive. It had scanned the system and programs partitions (I split up my disk a lot) without finding any problems.
On the off-chance, I went to the Users directory and deleted the contents of the Temp directory (except History, Cookies and Temporary Internet Files). Oddly enough, this had the desired effect; the instances of cmd.exe and ping.exe disappeared immediately and the laptop sprang back to life (albeit still running the scan). After 30 mins the scan completed a further 46% of the system (it's still running).
I don't know what caused the problem or how it got on to my system as I had done nothing unusual today, but it seems to have gone away, though I'll be checking very closely over the next 2 or 3 days.
Has anybody seen something like this? How did you deal with it?
Regards,
Felix
I opened Task Manager and noticed about a dozen instances of cmd.exe and ping.exe using a lot of CPU cycles. The performance tab showed very high CPU and hard drive utilisation. Something was very wrong! I had vivsions of having to reformat the disk and reinstall everything.
I started a complete scan using my security suite (Comodo) which, of course, didn't help speed the system up. In fact, it took 3 hours to scan 20% of my drive. It had scanned the system and programs partitions (I split up my disk a lot) without finding any problems.
On the off-chance, I went to the Users directory and deleted the contents of the Temp directory (except History, Cookies and Temporary Internet Files). Oddly enough, this had the desired effect; the instances of cmd.exe and ping.exe disappeared immediately and the laptop sprang back to life (albeit still running the scan). After 30 mins the scan completed a further 46% of the system (it's still running).
I don't know what caused the problem or how it got on to my system as I had done nothing unusual today, but it seems to have gone away, though I'll be checking very closely over the next 2 or 3 days.
Has anybody seen something like this? How did you deal with it?
Regards,
Felix