how can I identify what processes are causing my windows7 system to hang

-1

Recently I applied a firmware patcch for the spectre/meltdown vulnerabilities. Now my system has gotten extremely laggy. Frequently while I am working the system will just hang for a few seconds. It doesn't seem to matter which applications I have running. Sometimes I will have firefox and/or google chrome running, sometimes I will have a command prompt open with an ssh session running in it, sometimes I will have microsoft outlook running.

Sometimes this will happen just after a reboot when I am preparing to login, the login dialog will freeze for a few seconds.

I want to try to see if there is some process running (probably in the background) that is pegging the cpu or memory usage. My original thought is to use perfmon to do this but having dumped all available perfmon counters using: c:> typeperf.exe -q > counters.txt

I am uncertain which of the almost 34,000 counters I should look at to get the most relavent data.

I have found a script to add a perfmon data collector set via powershell which will enable me to setup the data collection more easily than the user interface allows (since I am blind), plus several other blind employees in my company have experienced the same issues so I could hand off the script to them to see if there is anything common between our sys tems.

BTW: I am running windows7 on a linovo thinkpad with 8 cores and 16gb of ram.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated even if they take a totally different approach. I just need to track down the problem.

dnraikes

Posted 2018-06-18T22:49:27.170

Reputation: 101

Answers

Umm... all that crap you mentioned aside, open up the Task Manager and select Processes tab. Next select view > Select Columns > add whichever field(s) you're interested in viewing and hit OK. Lastly, ensure the 'Show process from all users' box is checked at the bottom. You can also select the Performance tab, then Resource Monitor. Anything and everything you want to know can be found through the Task Manager. Of course I find it hard to believe that anyone working with SSH sessions wouldn't already know all this, but stranger things have happened I guess.

Josh Campbell

Posted 2018-06-18T22:49:27.170

Reputation: 747

Yes I know about task manager, but as a blind user I can't see the task manager when the problem is happening be cause I can't switch windows. That is why I was hoping that something like perfmon could log information for me and I could go back and see if there is some kind of sonsisteent pattern. – dnraikes – 2018-06-18T23:51:27.713

also how is taskmanager going to help me at the login screen? – dnraikes – 2018-06-19T00:02:23.880

"Frequently while I am working the system will just hang for a few seconds. It doesn't seem to matter which applications I have running. Sometimes I will have... I want to try to see if there is some process running (probably in the background) that is pegging the cpu or memory usage."

The fact that you squeezed a one-liner in there regarding the login screen freezing is irrelevant. If that's where you wanted your focus to be, then you should have left out the rest of the crap. – Josh Campbell – 2018-06-19T00:09:05.103

-1

Well, I did hear that the Spectre and Meltdown patches could cause significant performance drops.

Try organizing your counters in a most occuring order or highest CPU/RAM usage

Shadowcoder

Posted 2018-06-18T22:49:27.170

Reputation: 186