Just to verify that I wasn’t going off the deep end, I went to the TCP/IP tab on the parent Explorer.exe process. All kinds of IP addresses and websites were being accessed underneath the process explorer.exe.

Underneath properties I selected the TCP/IP tab, and soon noticed weird network activity. I right clicked on the suspicious process and selected Properties. I became suspicious that the sub process explorer.exe was malicious. I ran Processor Explorer and soon saw the parent Explorer.exe process had a sub process hiding underneath it called Explorer.exe.

These tools were immensely helpful in identifying what processes were using up memory and processor. Step One: Download Process Explorer and Process Monitor. I went down a lot of dead-end streets before killing the malware. I will list my steps and what I tried, bear with me if I’m kind of scattered. He told us the process, explorer.exe was hogging a lot of memory, sometimes up to 4 gigabytes of it! I connected and began troubleshooting his problem and soon came to the conclusion that malware was definitely the culprit for making his laptop run slowly. The customer contacted us and said his laptop had been running very slowly the past week or two. Recently, I had the opportunity or maybe misfortune of having to try to remove some malware. Malware I hate it with a passion! The new malware coming out these days is extremely smart.

Process monitor for windows 7