PDA

View Full Version : What Is This



boglin
01-14-2004, 06:21 AM
hello you wise people,and of course locustfurnace the great. every now and then whilst on the internet i can hear my hard drive working away as if its doing something and when i press ctrl alt delete something appears in the box that is not usually there, it shows as wuauboot i always end task on it and it doesnt appear to make any difference to the pc do you think it could be adware or spyware or something, any ideas?

Pete
01-14-2004, 09:46 AM
Are you running "Windows ME"?

If so, that may be the Automatic Update. See:
http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pa.../tasklist_w.htm (http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist_w.htm)
for a definition.

If you want to disable it and do updates manually see:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;EN-US;268331 (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;268331)

locustfurnace
01-14-2004, 02:51 PM
Windows Startup Inspector (http://www.windowsstartup.com/) FREE, helps users to manage Windows startup applications. Windows Startup Inspector provides information on the programs that are running at your Windows startup process. Whether a program is necessary to the system, or is the program a spyware.
You can also use msconfig to disable apps from loading at start up. Click the start / run, type msconfig, go to the startup tab.

If you are running Windows ME, it can also be the system restore application backing up your system, which should only take a few seconds.

If it is happening while your surfing the net, It could be your temporary internet cache being full and it is making space for new pages, so you might want to empty the Temp Internet folder. If it happens while running applications then that can be an indication that your swapping RAM to virtual memory (hard drive), and thats sometimes a good idication you may need more physical RAM installed. How much RAM do you have? Are you using a permanent swap space? Windows will constantly resize the swap size as the needs grow and shrink, if your disk is heavily fragmented, then you will hear the hard drive thrashing about as it reads and writes wildly across the disk. So it is a good thing if you set aside a permanent swap space, This will eliminate the constant resizing of the virtual memory.

You can read how to set up your swap space on this post.
http://www.oldversion.com/talk/index.php?a...&st=0#entry5485 (http://www.oldversion.com/talk/index.php?act=ST&f=1&t=1610&st=0#entry5485)

the gaffer
01-16-2004, 07:14 AM
wuauboot is the auto update facility kicking in, my windows me does exactly the same, that is presuming you are running me, if you let it run and updates are available they will download automatically and you will see an icon in the system tray,

TheBulbasaurfreak
01-16-2004, 02:14 PM
StartUpList (http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/downloads.html) is good as well.