I Think My Computer is Dying. Help!

[Negative Creep]

I've been having all sorts of problems with my computer of late. It's taking an absolute age to open any programs and when it does they normally crash when you switch between windows. o give an example, open a small program like DivX and it will still be trying to open it 10 minutes later. I think it may have caught a virus and something is continuously running which slows the whole thing down. On the Task Manager it is showing the CPU as running a constant 100% no matter what is open. Spybot and Adaware have found nothing, but the virus scanner will only scan 7 files and then give up. I can't defragment the hard drive either; it shows that about 1% of the hard drive is in use and will fail if you try to start it. It starts up fine but when I go to shut it down I have a mysterious program that isn't responding and has to be shut down manually.

There are lots of programs out there that promise to clean up your hard drive but I'm suspicious they may do more harm than good. Can anyone recommend a good (free) one? Or could it be something more serious like the hard drive or processor about to go tits up? I've backed up everything just to be on the safe side. The operating system is XP Home. Cheers!

[Munter]

In task manager. Whats the name of the process thats using all of the CPU?

[Negative Creep]

On the processes screen, there's something called NMIndexStoreSvr.exe that despite using only 11k of memory, shows between 90 and 99 on the CPU column. Is that it?

[Munter]

Thats whats slowing things up. Now the question is what the fack is it.

Right click on it in task manager and you should be able to "End Process". That'll stop it processing. You might be able to run your virus scan then.

Then I would search the hard drive and find out where that .exe file is. And if it's not something you want get rid of it. Move it somewhere else. Search the internet and find out what it does.

Be aware though I've had a few pints so take care whatever you do.....

[sjg]

It's part of the Nero Scout software that tries to index all the media files on your computer. Remove/disable it and try again.