Comp always "busy"

[Skoal]

Recently (last week or so) my comp seems to be busy all the time. I had it checked out by people at Best Buy and my hardware came back ok. I don't have any viruses. My comp is about 4 years old and has run smoothly up until now. I defragment regularly, scan for viruses/spyware and make sure everything is updated. My specs are

Windows Xp SP2

Pentium 4 2.0GHz, 2.79GHz, 512 MB of RAM.

Any thoughts or help would be greatly appreciated.

[Mhurron]

Re: Comp always "busy"

Define busy.

Also what anti-virus/anti-malware apps do you use?

[Skoal]

Re: Comp always "busy"

Busy as in my my light on my tower is always blinking and making that little sound. I use AVG, Avast, Spybot, Adaware, AVG Spyware, and I guess Windows Defender.

[Mhurron]

Re: Comp always "busy"

That blinking light is hard drive access. Have you installed something from google or msn that wants to index your drive.

Does the task manager show the processor is busy? (ctrl-shift-esc - click on the performance tab)

[Feba]

Re: Comp always "busy"

also, have you installed anything like SETI or BOINC that would be running continuously?

[Skoal]

Re: Comp always "busy"

No, no and no. My CPU % usage is only about 4-10% at most. services.exe and svchost.exe are the ones using it when it spikes that high. On my processor tab, my lines are not moving.

[Mhurron]

Re: Comp always "busy"

Turn off indexing.

[Skoal]

Re: Comp always "busy"

Did it and its still doing it.

Even though I have turned it off, services.exe is still running. I also disabled it. It no longer shows up when I do Run->services.msc. That was how I disabled it after I turned it off.

[Mhurron]

Re: Comp always "busy"

Services and svchost will always show up, your machine is always running services unless it is off.

Try this guide.
Windows XP Home and Professional Service Pack 2 Service Configurations by Black Viper

[Skoal]

Re: Comp always "busy"

I don't know if this did the trick, but I turned off indexing on my D drive also. Hopefully this won't be a problem anymore. Thanks for the help.