With everything running painfully slow, Dorslo discovered the one process that was to blame. The Answer Line forum suggested what to do.

When Windows slows down to an unbearable crawl, there's a good possibility that one particular process is at fault--sometimes taking close to 100-percent of the CPU's capabilities. In such a case, it's best to kill the process.

A process is a program or an independent piece of a program. As I write this, I have nine applications, but 81 processes, running on my computer.

To check your processes, right-click the taskbar and select Start Task Manager. Click the Processes tab, then the CPU column heading. That will put the culprit at the top of the list.

To kill a process, select it and click End Process. In the resulting, this-is-really-scary dialog box, click End Process again. Some program may close down or freeze up, but you'll have your computer back.

Once you've identified what is launching the resource hog, check to see i f there's an update or bug fix that addresses the problem. If there isn't, consider switching to a competitor.

My thanks to Flashorn for his contributions to the original forum discussion.

Add your comments to this article below. If you have other tech questions, email them to me at answer@pcworld.com, or post them to a community of helpful folks on the PCW Answer Line forum.