Fixing Performance Issue with Windows XP

A few days ago my laptop running Windows XP started to manifest unbearable performance degradation. It seemed to take forever to do even simple things. At this point it was clear that something is not right. I opened the "Task Manager" and clicked at the performance tab. CPU was 100% busy. What was taking up all the CPU resource? Clicking on the "Processes" tab and then sorting the processes based on CPU usage I saw that qttask.exe was the culprit. I killed this (supposed to be Quick Time related) process to free up some CPU resource in order to make progress. I say "supposed to be..." because the process was not behaving normally - indicative of a virus infection. (I had not updated my anti-virus definition files for a while - my mistake!). I uninstalled / removed any unused software from the system. Cleaned up the "auto start" programs - this considerably reduced start up time. Further I Downloaded the latest anti virus and let it loose to clean up the system. Once that was done (yes it did find threats) - enabled the firewall for future protection.
A quick google search revealed a couple of useful links on performance recovery and getting rid of malware. I am also linking a couple of additional resources here, related to performance tuning and protection against spyware.

posted by Amandeep 8/28/2007 10:35:00 PM | PERMALINK