{"id":1671,"date":"2015-09-07T23:42:35","date_gmt":"2015-09-07T21:42:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/?p=1671"},"modified":"2025-06-16T18:38:01","modified_gmt":"2025-06-16T16:38:01","slug":"is-your-windows-computer-getting-slow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/?p=1671","title":{"rendered":"Is your Windows computer getting slow?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My laptop very recently got much slower than usual. The harddisk LED was permanently on and it too ages for it to hibernate. I cleaned some garbage from the harddisk and could not really see in the ProcessExplorer what was keeping the system busy.<\/p>\n<p>Today afternoon it finally got out of control and suddenly I saw it: a single process was keeping the harddisk busy: <strong><em>wicainventory.exe<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>I never had a virus on my computers and I didn&#8217;t really suspect this task to be a third party virus &#8211; and indeed it came with a so-called Windows Update. Why I haven&#8217;t seen it as the culprit earlier, I don&#8217;t know, but a Google search quickly pointed me to a thread on Microsoft&#8217;s own support forum: <a href=\"http:\/\/answers.microsoft.com\/en-us\/windows\/forum\/windows_7-performance\/wicainventory-exe-causes-high-cpu-usage\/062ecc99-94de-43e1-98f7-484305752c69?page=3\" target=\"_blank\">wicainventory. exe causes high CPU usage<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The consensus in this discussion thread was that this task is sending huge amounts of telemetry data back to Microsoft &#8211; without asking permission and with a severe blocking of the rest of the Windows system. It arrived on my computer with the Windows Update <strong>KB2952664<\/strong>. <\/p>\n<p>And yes, it was quite easy to get the computer to perform OK again by just uninstalling this particular Windows Update!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My laptop very recently got much slower than usual. The harddisk LED was permanently on and it too ages for it to hibernate. I cleaned some garbage from the harddisk and could not really see in the ProcessExplorer what was keeping the system busy. Today afternoon it finally got out of control and suddenly I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers_en","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p48grL-qX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1671"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2405,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1671\/revisions\/2405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}