slow on a sunday

My PC always slows up on a Sunday evening around 8pm. programs take forever to open and it eventually hangs and i need to switch off without shutting down properly. i am running windows xp with service pack 2. I do not have anything scheduled for a Sunday that i can see so what can be causing this to happen only at this specific time each week?

There were 31 processes running last night when it slowed. svchost.exe was using 23,232k of memory - I have no idea what this process is, can anyone tell me what processes should be running and what can be stopped safely?

I cleaned and derfragged the drive yesterday and there is stacks of memory left (75% free)

Intel P4, 2.66ghz, 512mb ddr, 80gb drive.

Thanks

 

Hi when you go into Windows task Manger, right click on svchost.exe and see what priority it is set at..

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314056

 

Are you online at the time?maybee a guy like hacking your comp at that time or I dont know if its possible a trojan is set to activate and try and phone home on sundays,I would do a good spyware check anyways

 

you might want to go through black vipers tut on removing extra services as your computer is probably doing some unnecessary task via svchost

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

as you can see alot of the services call on svchost

 

Thanks for the replies guys. It happens whether I am on line or not. there are 7 svchost processes running today, total memory use is over 50,000k (ranges from 25,8180 to 3072) All are at normal priority. 4 are in system, 1 is in local service and the other 2 are in network service.

What does this host do and where did it come from?

I have ran adaware, spybot, spyware blaster and norton anti virus. All clear other than adaware which removed some tracking cookies.

I'll check out the black vipers tut later today.

Thanks again

 

That should read 25,180k NOT 25,8180. Typo!

 

Ignore as this reply was regarding svhost - not svchost

 

I've gone through the black viper tut but I am still no further forward. Any other ideas?

 

have you tried a 'Trojan' scan ?? a cracking one is 'Trojan Hunter' which i recently used on a friends com, where Norton had failed to detect and several other softies could not find and he had multiples of one 'jimbutt' 150+ entries.

 

I cant help but recommend you do a fresh post in the spyware section,READ THE STICKIES FIRST ,the guys in there are scary smart at least you can rule an infection out,Its O.k to have 2 threads.

 

You should really find out which svchost it is.
There are more than 4 of them.
The blackviper site will tell you which svchost are useless to you,if an infection
is striking that then you can safely disable the service.

 

OK, so I've followed all of the info re spy stuff and cleaned out a hell of a lot of stuff I never knew I had. I have also installed spysweeper and it seems to be doing a good job. I think I can rule out spyware now? The system does seem to be generally quicker but It still froze on me last night at around 7.30 pm.

Any other ideas what could be causing the pc to hang like this, only on a Sunday evening?

 

are you sure that you dont have a program like diskeeper scheduled to do a defrag at that specific time or something??

 

What you could try is changing your date and time to something really stupid

 

I don't have diskeeper and there is nothing scheduled at all. Ever! If i open task manager on a Sunday evening there are no programs running and the amount of processes running varies but is no different to any other time, generally.

What would be the benefit of changing the time and date Rikky?

 

the only way for whatever it is to know its sunday is to look at your clock,in fact you could go one better and pop your cmos battery out.then pop it back in.

 

OK, point taken Rikky. I think I would prefer a solution that deals with the route issue. Whatever it is that's doing it, I want to get rid of it. I had hoped that someone else might have seen this before and could lead me towards getting rid. i guess having a PC for 6 and a half days a week is better than none at all!!

 

look at what the event viewer said at and around the time it happened last sunday ... might give you a hint as to what is doing it

 

do u know what i would do? i would sell the pc and buy a new one and if it still happens mate i think u should give up lol

either that or get yourself a good firewall or something cos it might be someone hacking into your pc mate

 

Hi again, an observation/experience with Diskeeper last night. Diskeeper was taking a long time to defrag and got pissed so I stopped it, came out and it was still running 10 mins later so i went to task manager/processes and dleted from there yet it still went on until I rebooted , so what I am saying if you have a copy of DK would it not be wise to uninstall it saturday thus reassuring you it is not that ????