General computer questions

[Hamish Durie]

So I've googled this before but asking a search engine a question is tricky at the best of times, I haven't cleaned my computer in ages (more then a year now) and it's starting to do somethings I don't trust like 100% of disk drive being used all the time and task manager now opens by itself when I turn my computer on (never dome that before).
It tried logging itself on the other day when I had turned it on and left it there meaning I turned it on and pressed nothing just sat and watched it for a minute as it tried to log in then it realized there had been no input then prompted me for a password.
I did live with some bit coin miners awhile back please help I'm a windows only novice.
I'll be checking in every few hours to further conversation if applicable.

 

[Hamish Durie]

Post a screenshot of what processes are displayed as running in task manager a bit after boot

If you can identify which processes are ailing your computer you should be able to terminate them by right clicking them in task manager. You can organize them by cpu/disk usage so it should be pretty easy to tell. If they aren't malicious they should terminate without issue in which case you can open msconfig.exe and prevent them from running in future boots by unchecking them in the Services/Startup tab depending on the version of Windows your running. Reboot to test if all is well

If they are malicious they probably won't allow themselves to be terminated or it'll just run itself again immediately. If this is the case you'll probably want to look into virus removal software

Another route would be to system restore the computer before it was afflicted

 

[Hamish Durie]

Awesome thanks boys

Another route would be to system restore the computer before it was afflicted

Might just be easier to back up everything important (check like 25 times to make sure you didn't forget anything), then wipe the hard drive completely and reinstall Windows from scratch.

Post a screenshot of what processes are displayed as running in task manager a bit after boot

\*incomplete snip* How would I be able to tell, I do see somethings taking up 4.0mbs but that's the same as the browser I'm using and the file in question looks pretty official

 

[Hamish Durie]

Gotta mostly figure that out for yourself there through research. Doing some google searches of the process name will help. This is also why I suggested taking a screenshot to share here

If your disk is in constant 100% use with nothing running task manager should make it abundantly clear what process(es) is/are responsible

Task Manager in Windows 8-10 displays disk usage in MB/s so for two programs to be using 8 MB/s in total while seemingly idle is a red flag. If they weren't reading/writing data per your order something is up

 

[sanquin]

When weird stuff starts to happen on my PC I usually first just google search for a while. And if I can't find the problem I just format the drive and reinstall windows. And for this reason I have 2 separate disks. 1 for windowd and all programs I'd want to reinstall anyway when reinstalling windows. (like vlc, keyboard drivers, antivirus, display drivers, etc) And another for everything else. (Games, videos, photos, music, stuff like that.)

I can generally format, reinstall windows and get everything up and running again in 2~3 hours. Apart from a select few games that for some reason won't work unless they were installed on the windows currently installed that is. (Like effing origin games, for instance.)

 

[Jamcie Kerbizz]

If you're at this point just set up dual boot. Reinstall Windows and use it ONLY for gaming, get Ubuntu and use it for work and everything else.