SysMain

[Archeryrob]

It seems the personal computer does some unknown crap more and more and the system becomes unusable when it happens. Hard drive at 100% usage and everything is

The hard drive is going full tilt and SysMain seems to be the main utility doing it. What does this utility do and what happens if I disable it?

It will run sometimes out of no where and says nothing what it is doing. It is unresponsive to a 20 second delay on mouse commands. hit CTRL ALT DEL and it can take a few minutes for task manager to pop up.

 

[Occam]

It seems the personal computer does some unknown crap more and more and the system becomes unusable when it happens. Hard drive at 100% usage and everything is

The hard drive is going full tilt and SysMain seems to be the main utility doing it. What does this utility do and what happens if I disable it?

It will run sometimes out of no where and says nothing what it is doing. It is unresponsive to a 20 second delay on mouse commands. hit CTRL ALT DEL and it can take a few minutes for task manager to pop up.

Very first search result on Google:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...-running/8d430ea3-6e91-4b96-9fe4-d2f1ef97c7ab

 

[Archeryrob]

Thanks, but what is this for?

Could not do the command prompt. Went in to registry and changed it from 2 to 4, what ever that mean and restarted. I'll wait and see

 

[Occam]

Thanks, but what is this for?

The second, third, fourth, and so many other Google results explain all of that.

But if you can't get to those to read them, in short: it's a revision to a legacy cache/pre-loader that attempts to scan for executables and make them faster to load under specific circumstances. That involves periodic housekeeping by that subsystem, especially after the system perceives that you've installed or updated executable things, and it has to give it all another once-over.

If your system is relatively quick on its feet otherwise, it's not something you need to have running.

 

[Archeryrob]

It did it again today and was was able to slowly get Task Manager open and Firefox loading down the computer. It was just open and stilling idle while I was working on the work computer. Not sure how or why but Firefox has 8 or 9 instances in Task Manager when open and I looked in extension and don't see stuff added. One of the instances, there must have been 12 or more at that time was loading the computer down terribly. Turned off firefox and it slowly get better.

Thinking of trying Chrome just to be sure, but how would firefox do this while being idle?

 

[Glaron]

Where is it connecting? Id look for IP's if you can.

 

[Occam]

Chrome can also get very busy if you keep a lot of tabs open, it seems to handle system resources better than Firefox.

I routinely have more than thirty Chrome tabs open at once.

 

[smdub]

Older machine? I've had hard drives start to fail and the read performance started dragging the system to a halt like that. Installed new drive, used a clone utility to copy everything over, then removed the old drive. Computer was much faster after. If you don't have a ton of stuff, consider replacing w/ a SSD. Can breath new life into old systems.