No. of Recommendations: 1
Hi all -

I consider myself a reasonable man.

I consider myself reasonably tech-savvy. I have home-built our last 3 computers, and even broke the warranty to upgrade the memory in my MacBook.

So it drives me UP A FREAKING WALL when - as always seems to happen - my PCs start getting "lazy" on me.

Now it's the home PC. Windows 7, 64-bit, home-built. The symptom is that it just...runs...slow - but with an average of 5% CPU utilization. So it's not that it's getting old (it's only a year or so old, and was built with reasonably top-shelf parts), but that some process seems to be blocking.

I'm not looking for a miracle from the wise Fools here, but could use some help on how to even go about starting to work on this.

I really think it's some piece of software that does something on startup - example candidates include Microsoft Security Essentials, DropBox, Carbonite, etc. I think one of them is trying to phone home, and gets blocked. I try to aggressively keep things like the Adobe Updater and iTunes updater from starting, but they keep coming back.

I can run Hijack This or S&D or whatever is in use today, if others could help point out likely culprits and suggest steps I might follow to unclog things. It was definitely much faster when first built, so I 'm highly suspicious of, oh, maybe a Windows update, or some other piece of poorly-updated software or something.

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