617 Processes and VERY SLOW Laptop

Hope someone has come across this problem before and can help....

Basically, I have a laptop with Windows 7 installed and when it boots I have about 70-80 Processes running.

With 24 hours I have over 600 processes running and most of the 4GB of memory is used up, maybe 80-95%, and the laptop will hardly respond. for instamce to open IE, it will take 4 or 5 minutes. CPU usage is around 0-20%.

The processes are made up of multiples of various programs, depending on what I have run previously. For instance i can have 7-10 Adobe Acrobat processes, or 20-30 IE processes.

It seems that when programs are opened and closed, although the program closes the process does not end, and more system processes just keep appearing as thet start and stop int he background, the processes do not teminate and then when it restarts an new process is created.

I have scanned for visuses, but nothing found.

Any help would be appreciated as I can not even killt he processes manually. after a few hours the laptop has to be restarted. After 24 hours i have to power off completely without shutting down as I am unable to shutdown safley.

Are these said programs responding ok when running?

if i understand what your going through then this should help How to Kill Stubborn Processes That Fail to End Process in Task Manager » My Digital Life


or try Daphne its free also

Ok, whe i have hundreds of processes showing in Task Manager, the laptop runs very very slow, like I said can take 5 minutes to open Internet Explorer.

As for the multiple instances of the same process, such as Adobe Acrobat, Internet Explorer, Outlook etc etc, the application that corresponds to the process is not even running, they seem liked Orphaned Processes which will not terminate.

I had thought about trying pskill.exe before I posted this massage, but I simply couldnot get it to work as i was unable to move the pskill.exe file, CMD would not run and hung, then I could not exit it and it was basically jusy impossible to do anything so I ended up having to power off and reboot to post here.

To give you an idea, the laptop has been powered back on for 40minutes now, and in that time i have gained an extra 30 running processes.

Have you also tried this;

Start => cmd :

Typing in the cmd tasklist will show you a list of running applications and tasks, with their PID's.

You can terminate a process by typing taskkill /im process.exe, or taskkill /pid number.

Maybe its your HDD?

I have, but to be honest what i am asking is why the processes are mounting up all the time..... When an application is closed, or a background process terminates automatically, the process should also be killed off and the systems resources such as memory etc shoul dbe freeded up.

at the moment the App or background process seems to terminate, but the process is not being killed off and keeps using system resources. The processes will not terminate with any method, and i do not want to have to keep manually managing the processes, this should be automatic and no matter how long the laptop is on, the number of running processes at anyone time should be fairly stable, depending on what apps i have running.

seems to me there is something else going on here, i will look into it.

It could be one of windows services running try disabling windows search, open up msconfig and check to see what non windows services are starting on startup and check to see if there are any other programs in the startup section as well, just disable all startup programs and all non windows services and see if it still does it after reboot if it stops by doing this start enabling some of the essential services like your antivirus and what not and reboot to see if it does it repeat this till you find the program causeing this.

make sure your drive is not indexing.