Help Needed

[Frodo]

I have been having alot of problems with my computer lately. I am running a Dell P4, 2.4ghz, 256MB RDRAM, and a 80GB Hard Drive. And Windows XP Pro. Lately, whenever doing anything, it will lock up and close out of all of my apllications. I was just about to finish this post a minute ago and it locked up. I noticed when not doing anything, ~86% of my system resources are being used up! When running a program 100%! The computer is running very very slow, and games lock up every 2 min all of a sudden. I also noticed that there are somewhere around 45 processes running, many of which should not be there. Is there anyway to remove them? I don't want to damage my computer, but I also know that I could have a worm, it has happened before. One program gets an error message every time that I log on, ~66.exe. I have no clue what it is, and no clue what it does. I have been trying to fix my pc myself, but to no avail. Is there anything I can do to fix my PC?

[Inoculator9]

I use norton for that kind of thing. You could try restarting your computer while holding down shift, that starts the computer with a minimum of running programs :-

[number6]

I don't have XP, but if it has the msconfig application I would run that and disable all of the startup processes that are not needed.

Here is a link from MS on how to use msconfig for XP:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q310560

You may want to print it real fast before your computer crashes again. After disabling startup processes in msconfig you need to reboot. See if most of those proceses are gone. Next I would try and do a virus scan of your whole harddrive. Hopefully you will find the virus and be able to delete it before your computer locks up again. If you can't do all that I am guessing you will need to reformat the harddrive and start fresh.

[Nyarlathotep]

If you want to scan your pc online, here's a link where you can do just that. Just in case your virus scanner might be infected as well.

[Frodo]

thank you, problem solved, im only using 10% of my resources now, and it hasn't locked up. :) Thank you Number6 and Nyar.