Hi, sorry to hear of the problems with your machine.
1 If you "Ctrl+Alt+Del" this should bring up Task Manager and if you click on the "Processes" Tab and then the column header for CPU it will provide a guide as to what is using your CPU cycles. Once you identify the processes concerned, fire up your favourite search engine to look for more infomartion on what they are and what they do. The "Applications" Tab will show you Programmes that you have running
2 There are more sophisticated programmes that do a similar job to Task Manager, but the steps outlined above provide a good starting point.
3 Likely "suspects" for the CPU activity (in no particular order)
- An Anti virus scanner or other security product either scanning your system, or calling "home" to update itself
- Other programs calling "home" to look for updates (including the Windows or Microsoft Update service)
- Windows, or other indexing service, indexing your files
- Undesirable or malicious elements either calling "home" or admitting other bad code to your machine or using their own SMTP type engine to mass mail. (using your machine as a server)
4 There could be lots of non-sinister explanations, but using Task Manager may give you a good starting point.
5 To narrow things down a bit it can be instructive to physically disconnect from the Internet (pull out the plug) and see if this has any effect on the CPU load.
6 Your logs Over in the malware removal forum indicate you have a large number of Adobe products installed, and image manipulation and photograhic apps some of which are not the current versions. Do you need and use them all? The latest "Reader" for example (V9, you have V8) can be a download of over 200 MB and this on a 1Meg connection for example could easily take 5 hours to download. ( rendering your machine practically unusable at the time)
Your Java is also not up to date and the older versions have vulnerabilities. update 7 is the latest version.
7 It is not necessary to have many programmes running from "Startup" This will slow down your boot up and loading times as will lots of fonts all loading….You can disable applications from running on startup by using msconfig
Start>Run>msconfig>Enter>Startup and deselect what is not required
NOTE you should always have your firewall and anti virus/spyware products running from startup, but the rest are generally optional.
8 A couple of hundred fonts is about the maximum I would recommend you have installed, but as each one needs to be loaded from startup it can lead to extended startup time if you have more. Windows is generally stable with up to about 950 fonts loaded but will tend to crash with errors if you have very many more.( and take forever to boot up and load!)
Post back here, if you need further info.
Regards
paws
