Hi, and thanks in advance for the help. My computer has very little memory so I keep it really clean. Pretty much all I do with it is browse the web and stream media. Recently it has been very slow, and Firefox (49.2) has been hanging all the time. At first I thought it was Firefox, and I followed all their instructions to identify high resource using plugins, etc. I deleted all the history, ran CCleaner, etc. Then I realized that even if I close FF I am still seeing frequent (about every five seconds) spikes to 100% CPU usage, and it frequently runs over 50% even if I am doing nothing at all. I ran Avast and Malwarebytes and MSE - full scan with each one and none of them found anything. Is it possible that my computer resources are being hacked and used by someone else? Like for bitcoin mining or whatever? How would I figure this out and stop it? If that is unlikely, what can I do to improve performance. It seems kind of ridiculous that to open a document or a web page it takes "forever." Even writing this post I have to type, and then watch the screen while the letters slowly appear ...
Not sure what is relevant to the problem, but I have 4MB of RAM, but only 80GB hard drive (hope I'm saying that right), of which only 29GB is Free. Right now I have 1480 Cached, 1725 Available and ~320 is Free, There are 69 total processes running. The only applications running are FF and two LibreOffice documents. I checked a couple days ago and the system said I did not need to defrag.
I don't even know if all that stuff has anything to do with CPU spikes, so that's how little I know!!
Any and all help is much appreciated!
