Replies

John G,

This was one of my toughest ever, but ServiWin worked. … I am impressed and thankful.

John

I’m happy it worked for you. Thanks for the feedback.

You may find Microsoft Sysinternals Autoruns: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902, helpful in stopping Symantec from starting.

But sometimes AV programs protect themselves by removing Administrator privileges from their registry entries. So if Autoruns cannot change the startup, you may need to give yourself permission first to the respective registry entries.

– John G

A somewhat different problem than the “svchost.exe”: This started last November, but the process locking up the system is “system” at 98% on the Task Manager. Dell Dimension 4100 with 512 RAM (maxed out) running XP-Pro SP3. Automatic Updates turned off-on-off. Most .tmp and ~*.* files deleted. C drive is FAT32, using 92 GB of 127 GB. System will boot into Safe Mode and then uses only 1% of CPU. Malwarebytes finds nothing. How do we track down and kill whatever is doing this to this fine old relic? John

First, using msconfig, choose “Diagnostic Startup” and reboot.

This will disable virtually all services except those required to start Windows.

If you don’t get 100% CPU then you can start reenabling services in groups, until you narrow down the culprit.

If you still get 100% CPU, yet you don’t get it in Safe mode, then I strongly suspect a driver issue. Probably something you installed or updated recently.

The difference between Safe mode and this Diagnostic mode is that Safe mode disables most drivers, while Diagnostic mode disables most services.

Download and run this Nir Sofer ServiWin utility: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/serviwin.html. Like the ShellExView utility previously suggested, this requires no install, and saves nothing to the registry. Like most of Nir’s utiliities, it is stand-alone.

Note in the upper left corner two gear icons, one for services and the other for drivers. This is a powerful utility, giving you the ability to stop drivers and services, and change their startup type. You can sort them by startup type, status, company, product name, etc.

Selectively change driver startup type and reboot, until you find the culprit.

Since this shows all installed drivers, including those already not started, you’ll want to keep careful notes of what you stop so you can restore things to the way they were.

– John G.

Sorry if this has been covered elsewhere but I couldn’t find it. Does anyone have experience of an update version of something akin to Xtree that gave a simple clear visual comparison of of 2 directories in a split screen, and could easily sync the two? Many thanks

For something akin to XTreeGold, I concur with dg1261. Try ZTree (ZTreeWin).

This is not only a perfect successor to XTreeGold, but in my opinion the most powerful file manager available for Windows. Among its many new features you’ll find the split-screen sync ability is much improved over XTree.

For those not familiar with XTree, this is a console-mode program, so it’s not GUI, and at first may appear to be very DOS-like. But don’t be fooled. It’s absolutely amazing what this program can do.

There is however a learning curve, so you must be prepared to spend some time studying it to appreciate its power. It is in my opinion best suited for those with technical interests and a preference for using single-key commands rather than the mouse (although the mouse is supported).

The feature list is massive, and it is actively updated and supported by the author, Kim Henkel.

The download includes both 32 and 64-bit versions, with a 31-day free trial. After that the price is $30.

– John G.