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I'm using Window 7 Ultimate. I get a problem with two processes, namely explorer.exe and sometimes dwm.exe.
The two processes tend to use cpu between 20-30%.
And it only occurs when i play some game on my PC. My PC works perfect until I play some game.
And another important observation:
They consume no cpu as such but only consumes when I try to refresh my desktop. I mean when I right-click on desktop. It takes seconds for refresh.
I have no virus problems.
I had already tried following things:
Kill explorer.exe and relaunch from task manager. (Problem still persists)
Kill dwm.exe, well it relaunches again. (Problem still persists)
Log Off and Log On. (Problem still persists)
Restart. Problem Solved. (But need an alternative).
Can anyone kindly suggest some quick fixes to the problem?
Those who get the same problem may refer to this question at super user asked by me.
https://superuser.com/questions/254343/window-7-problem-explorer-exe-dwm-exe
My problem solved with ShellExView.
Yeah, this is to be expected. Both of those are critical components of the Windows operating system.
Explorer.exe is responsible for the desktop, the file manager, the taskbar, and most visible components of the Windows shell. Generally, when you're not interacting with a particular application program, you're interacting directly with Windows Explorer. And it's still there in the background when applications are running, managing those applications and the underlying system.
DWM stands for "Desktop Window Manager", which should help to give away what it does. It's a graphical subsystem that was introduced in Windows Vista, and it's responsible for the fancy 3D effects that you get on your desktop now. It drives the "Aero" user interface, so things like glass transparency, Aero Peek, Aero Shake, and a host of other eye candy features are implemented by this process.
Understanding what both of those processes are and what they do should help to explain the phenomenon you cite in your question:
They consume no cpu as such but only consumes when i try to refresh my desktop. I mean when i right click on desktop.
When you refresh your desktop, you're invoking functionality provided by both of those processes. Explorer is responsible for drawing the desktop itself (programmatically, it's implemented as an iconic ListView control managed by Explorer), and DWM is responsible for the graphics subsystem that gets the desktop, in all its beautifully composited glory, onto the screen in the first place.
Using between 20-30% of your CPU is hardly an outrageous draw. That leaves plenty left over for your foreground applications. It's also difficult to monitor exactly what percentage of the CPU those processes are using without altering the results.
But, from the symptoms that you've described, you can be sure that you don't have a virus or anything else wrong with your computer. That's just Windows running, doing its thing. If your computer is struggling to keep up with the game that you're playing, you may need to consider upgrading some of your computer's components (namely your RAM, processor, and/or graphics card).
If you're recently upgraded your computer to Windows 7 from an earlier version (like Windows XP), and have noticed your performance slow down as a result, your graphics card may be struggling under the 800-pound gorilla that is DWM. All of the Aero effects are expensive to run—not a problem for today's overpowered and overpriced video cards that generally sit around doing nothing, but a significant performance hit for older systems that used to run just fine with older versions of the OS. You might try reverting to the Windows Classic theme, which will disable most of the Aero-themed goodness, but will also put some of the "pep" back into your computer's step. Do that by right-clicking on your desktop, selecting "Personalize", and changing your theme to Windows Classic.
Both explorer and dwm are "necessary" files that Windows runs. Explorer.exe is basically all the user interface you see on Windows: the desktop, the taskbar, explorer, etc. Similarly, dwm.exe is the Desktop Window Manager: it governs all the effects that were added with Vista and 7, like the taskbar thumbnails that appear when you hover over a taskbar item, transparency, etc. So it makes sense that you see action on them when trying to refresh the desktop.
I've never actually looked to see how much processing power they use at any given time, so I can't say whether that's excessive or not, but there's really nothing wrong with either one; they probably ought to be running, and unless they're causing undue CPU use, you probably don't need to worry about them. And if you do need to worry about them, then it might be a consequence of your computer not being powerful enough to run Windows 7.
All that said, this isn't really a question for this site. I'm still pretty new here myself, but I think this should be moved to Superuser?
Related
Recently installed AutoHotKey to remap some keys in order to play a video game. It seemed simple/attractive enough at first. Was not really sure of how it worked but found the .chm file in the download which states in the first line of Usage & Syntax/Using the program:
AutoHotkey doesn't do anything on its own; it needs a script to tell it what to do.
Sounds 'secure' enough to me. Seems like mature software. Maybe overkill (now I know it certainly was overkill) but let's just see how it works.
My remapping was simple enough: change the AWSD keys for the LEFT-UP-DOWN-RIGHT keys. Script syntax is simple enough, just used an example that comes with the install files. Works essentially as expected. Got an annoying pop up after playing the game for a bit from AutoHotKey saying "you've pressed mapped keys 600 times" or something like that. Which was only a little annoying, so I ignored it the first few times. The game I play is real time so getting a even a 5 second interruption while in a match would mean certain loss, so I decided to just disable the script and uninstall.
Lo and behold: when I stop the script, the keys continue to be remapped. Was there some background process running? Maybe. I rebooted only to find that on my Windows login screen my keys continue to be remapped. Huh? Did AHK mess with some registry bindings or something?
I do not know that much about how Windows works, but my vague recollection is that registry bindings is something is active once the OS is active. I search on the web for say 1 hour before I give up for the time being and I end up activating the script again in order to write normally. This works as expected and I literally forget about it until any time I have to reboot.
Honestly a minor annoyance, but due to the world changing very quickly I lately have very few precious minutes that I can actually sit down on my desktop, whereas I used to be able to spend hours on this type of computer issue in order to get to the bottom of it. In other words, my current solution felt good enough. But not anymore. I think something more serious and possibly nefarious may have occurred. I don't want to seem dramatic but I just discovered something else a few minutes ago.
I have a Linux installation on another drive and I just happened to want to load it up after my last Windows blue screen (have gotten a couple of those lately, literally 2 in the space of 2 days and this had maybe only ever happened once before, like 2 years ago, so I am a already concerned about a possible deeper issue). My firmware/bios has a password and guess what I found when I tried inputting it: the keys were still remapped.
At this point I am at a complete loss. I didn't even think this sort of thing was possible. Some OS level software caused a change that was able to be reflected on the bios? Did it affect the keyboard driver? A driver that both windows and the motherboard bios use?
What else have I tried or looked at:
Device Manager claims my Keyboard has 3 instances of "HID Keyboard device". Not entirely sure why it shows 3. Properties show it has 2 driver files: kbdclass.sys and kbdhid.sys, which I suppose are some standard drivers. Not sure how to proceed.
My keyboard is inland (cheapest i could find at microcenter) i am not sure why I cannot find the website for that company. Found some drivers on reddit but they are on some sysadmin's google drive. I will download that exe when i am desperate...
UPDATE
I 'solved' the issue bye getting another keyboard (an old IBM KB-0225) and everything is now in order. I tried disconnecting the Inland keyboard and reconnecting, but after reconnecting I was still experiencing the same issue.
I don't know if I should close this question as there is no longer an issue, but I would like to see if anyone has any other additional theory as to why some software/driver changed occurred inside a keyboard device. As far as I knew, these devices have not internal memory other than possibly some logic gates.
There must be a background process running.
to check that:
note : For windows 10
On your taskbar, click on the ^ button (skip this step if there is no such button)
right-click on the sign.
click on "exit"
If the above steps do not work, try keeping a watch all the time, to see if you notice something uncommon.
I wrote a compiled MATLAB GUI that we run on a remote machine via Remote Desktop. Overall it runs fine, but sometimes the GUI will blank out many of the control objects (buttons, table, popups). It seems to happen after the screen of the client computer has been locked or after the GUI has been minimized.
If you move the mouse over the buttons, popups, or table headers, they reappear. The table cells will reappear if they are selected. The GUI hasn't crashed and still works fine, but the objects just disappear until you make them reappear again. I have only seen this happen when using remote desktop (Windows-Windows using Remote Desktop Connection).
How can I get this to stop happening? It isn't really breaking anything, but it is very annoying.
I don't know if this is an issue with MATLAB or with the Remote Desktop configuration, so I posted this question here. Feel free to move this to superuser if you think it's more appropriate.
Remote Desktop has issues with handling low level rendered graphics, and interacting with graphics cards. In our experience (we use Nvidia GPU's for rendering and computation engines on multiple projects/applications) we have found remote desktop to fail in so many cases, that we have ditched it for a third party tool.
I suspect this is what you are running into.
One option I would consider, is forcing Matlab to do software rendering, if this fixes the problem, then for certain it's the graphics cards. The first hit on a google search for "matlab software rendering" returns the matlab command opengl. Reading the documentation page for that, gives the command:
opengl software
It sounds like the remote desktop minimization is causing it. For efficiency, Windows will disable various graphics when a Remote Desktop window is minimized on the client computer. To prevent this, create and set a DWORD RemoteDesktop_SuppressWhenMinimized to 2 at the following registry location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client
After doing this minimizing and locking your screen shouldn't do anything to the RDP session. I doubt it's a graphics card issue, as Windows 10 Creator's Edition allowed remote sessions to use the remote graphics card just like as if you were running locally.
You can ask Windows 7 to remember the Windows Explorer (WE) windows that were open when it last shut down, and it will then restore all of those WE windows the next time the system is booted. What Win 7 does not do is remember exactly how each WE window was set up (position, size, sizes of panes, etc). This omission forces one to manually restore all of this every time one reboots.
I seek a way to ether enhance WE so that it will do this automatically, or find a way to save the configuration information at shut-down time and "push" the saved data into each WE window at boot time, so that the WE windows are restored accurately and correctly. Best would be a way to remember the exact parameters for each folder on the HD and restore the WE windows appropriately each time a folder is opened by WE. A database of sorts might be required.
This might be achieved through registry hacks, or by writing software that runs at shutdown, boot time, or the entire time the system is running.
Most nVidia and ATI have window manager software that allow to save/restore the icons and windows position/size.
Or try this little software:
http://www.sevenforums.com/customization/40916-shellfolderfix-manage-folder-window-positions-size.html
I need to run some code when my computer resumes from hibernate (even before I logon). The laptop I am using has a bizzare problem. If I have an external monitor connected to it while resuming from hibernate the laptop chooses the external display as the main video device and the laptop screen remains blank. This becomes more frustrating when sometimes both displays remain blank indefinitely.
I am thinking of writing some code to switch the active display back to the laptop screen when the computer resumes from hibernate. But which windows event do I need to look for to begin with?
The built in hot keys for switching the display have also stopped working. I have reinstalled the OS several times by now and things go smoothly for a few days after that and then its back to square one.
This article on CodeProject discusses the various Windows messages that relate to power saving events.
I think most laptops have issues with that. It is not something they seem to be able to solve in the drivers/ACPI BIOS.
I know Linux allows you to modify the ACPI tables, but I cannot remember if this is possible on Windows.
A Google should provide links to tools you can use to inspect your laptop's ACPI tables in Windows (MS tools IIRC).
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I know this isn't strictly speaking a programming question but something I always hear from pseudo-techies is that having a lot of entries in your registry slows down your Windows-based PC. I think this notion comes from people who are trying to troubleshoot their PC and why it's running so slow and they open up the registry at some point and see leftover entries from programs they uninstalled ages ago.
But is there any truth to this idea? I would not think so since the registry is essentially just a database and drilling down to an entry wouldn't take significantly longer on a larger registry. But does it?
EDIT: To be clear, I'm not looking for advice on how to make a PC run faster, or asking why my PC in particular is slow (it's not), I'm just curious if people who say "bigger registry means slower PC" are accurate or not.
I think its a symptom, not a cause, as fever is a symptom of an infection.
When you install windows updates, at least in xp and up, a folder called SXS is maintained for rolling them back. These rollback points are also stored in reg keys.
The size of the sxs(side by side) folder grows exponentially and definitely has been linked to why, when some people simple reinstall with sp3 instead of installing sp1 and rolling up to sp3 they get better performance, even with the same programs installed.
1) Start -> Run -> msconfig
2) Check the Startup tab
3) If you don't know what it is, uncheck
4) Reboot
Its not the registry, its the crap you have running in the background.
In short, not really.
In the old days when machines were slower the answer was yes; but having a modern processor rip through even a 60MB registry is not a problem.
Typically, the real reason a modern machine starts running slow is due to everything from malware to virus scanners: Mcafee, Norton's, etc are prime targets in my mind.
Also, the WinSXS folder tends to grow as service packs and applications are installed. This seems to have a negative impact on system performance. There are only two possible solutions in this scenario. First, if possible, reinstall the OS with the latest service pack already slipstreamed into the install. Second, if that isn't possible AND you are running Vista with SP1, you can run the vsp1cln.exe tool (see technet) which will clean up a lot of the older versions of components. Note that this tool can only be executed once and it does not allow you to roll back.
any problems occur on the registry could also make your computer much slower.the fix registry problems you need to install a registry cleaner as this will fix the errors and make your pc back to its normal state.