Computer being sluggish

Zombiemambo

My computer is being unreasonably slow. First thought was the amount of junk I had on my PC, so I got rid of most of it (few gigs worth), but didn't notice any changes in speed. So I checked my task manager to see what processes were going on in the background, and found something rather suspicious:



Fahcore_78. Never heard of it before, so I think it might be a virus. There is also random gibberish like "crss.exe" and "lsass.exe." Can anyone identify these programs as being malicious or otherwise?

Furthermore, what software would you recommend for deleting viruses? A format is out of the question, because Apple is a shitty company that won't let me re-download my music, and I have nothing to back it up to. Besides that, I have other stuff I don't want to lose.

AtomBomb

Are you running folding@home? AFAIK, that's what that process is. It would make your computer quite sluggish, as it is supposed to use your spare computing power to help solve complex medical equations, like seti@home does for aliens.

embrik

AtomBomb is right, that's a Folding@home process. You can read a forum about it here. Otherwise, csrss.exe, lsass.exe and smss.exe are normal Windows processes. You don't actually have a crss.exe on your system, do you? I didn't see it in the image, but you mentioned it in your post.
It also looks like you might have Windows OneCare (based on MsMpEng.exe). I have heard some performance issues related to it while it's "scanning". Since you blanked out the CPU utilization, I can't tell if it's hogging your CPU, but that might be part of it.

Zombiemambo

embrik wrote: »

AtomBomb is right, that's a Folding@home process. You can read a forum about it here. Otherwise, csrss.exe, lsass.exe and smss.exe are normal Windows processes. You don't actually have a crss.exe on your system, do you? I didn't see it in the image, but you mentioned it in your post.
It also looks like you might have Windows OneCare (based on MsMpEng.exe). I have heard some performance issues related to it while it's "scanning". Since you blanked out the CPU utilization, I can't tell if it's hogging your CPU, but that might be part of it.

It all says '00'. I blocked it in case it might give away too much information or some such. I don't know.

It's probably just a virus then, because even without Folding@Home running it's very slow.

Bouncing_Soul

I'm almost positive lsass.exe and csrss.exe are harmless and part of Windows. I don't know what all that other shit is, like the three instances of CLI.exe.

http://housecall.trendmicro.com is a good place to start for scanning for viruses/malware. It's a free online virus scanner.