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I share this in the hope it might be of interest.
I have an old desktop PC running windows XP. Yes it's an old dinosoar, but it has a lot of software on it that I use from time to time and I really can't be bothered to start over and re install it all until i have to.
So for some time it's been playing up. The symptoms are a bit wierd, it will just stop, sometimes for up to a minute. When I say stop, I mean all programs stop responding, it's as though the user interface stalls, e,g an animated gif on the screen will stop animating, the mouse pointer won't change as you hover over a button etc, and the disk activity light is on solid while it's stalled.
The even more wierd thing is I could get no sense out of task manager. You would expect some program to be hogging all the CPU time, but no, task manager was saying system idle process had 98% of cpu time.
I've scanned for viruses and malware many times, nothing found. I've defragged the disk a couple of times, but nothing really made a difference. I have uninstalled some old softwre but still no improvement.
Then today, by chanc e I found it. I read somewhere to use Event viewer, and what that showed me is very frequently a program called "Bonjour" is logging errors, and the times of the errors seemed to coincide with the lock ups.
So get onto google, what exactly is Bonjour.
It turns out to be an unwanted program that is put there when you install Itunes. Yes years ago when SWMBO had an ipod (before she saw the light) I had itunes on this pc. itunes has long been removed, but of course it never had the good grace to also remove this Bonjour thing at the same time.
So tonight I have got rid of Bonjour. No more lock ups. No more errors in event viewer.
The cynical part of me says it's malware put there by Apple to cripple your pc in the hope you will replace it with an i thingy. NOT A HOPE. It's even more reason to avoid anything that starts with an i.
So if you have a windoze pc that's keeps locking up, have a look with event viewer and see if Bonjour is there logging errors. If so get rif of it.
I hope you found todays PC clinic useful.
I have an old desktop PC running windows XP. Yes it's an old dinosoar, but it has a lot of software on it that I use from time to time and I really can't be bothered to start over and re install it all until i have to.
So for some time it's been playing up. The symptoms are a bit wierd, it will just stop, sometimes for up to a minute. When I say stop, I mean all programs stop responding, it's as though the user interface stalls, e,g an animated gif on the screen will stop animating, the mouse pointer won't change as you hover over a button etc, and the disk activity light is on solid while it's stalled.
The even more wierd thing is I could get no sense out of task manager. You would expect some program to be hogging all the CPU time, but no, task manager was saying system idle process had 98% of cpu time.
I've scanned for viruses and malware many times, nothing found. I've defragged the disk a couple of times, but nothing really made a difference. I have uninstalled some old softwre but still no improvement.
Then today, by chanc e I found it. I read somewhere to use Event viewer, and what that showed me is very frequently a program called "Bonjour" is logging errors, and the times of the errors seemed to coincide with the lock ups.
So get onto google, what exactly is Bonjour.
It turns out to be an unwanted program that is put there when you install Itunes. Yes years ago when SWMBO had an ipod (before she saw the light) I had itunes on this pc. itunes has long been removed, but of course it never had the good grace to also remove this Bonjour thing at the same time.
So tonight I have got rid of Bonjour. No more lock ups. No more errors in event viewer.
The cynical part of me says it's malware put there by Apple to cripple your pc in the hope you will replace it with an i thingy. NOT A HOPE. It's even more reason to avoid anything that starts with an i.
So if you have a windoze pc that's keeps locking up, have a look with event viewer and see if Bonjour is there logging errors. If so get rif of it.
I hope you found todays PC clinic useful.
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