Category Archives: Troubleshooting

C:\Windows\Explorer.exe is acting as a Virus, Windows 7

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Malware I hate it with a passion! The new malware coming out these days is extremely smart. Recently, I had the opportunity or maybe misfortune of having to try to remove some malware.

The customer contacted us and said his laptop had been running very slowly the past week or two. He told us the process, explorer.exe was hogging a lot of memory, sometimes up to 4 gigabytes of it!Explorer.exe Hogging Memory 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. I will list my steps and what I tried, bear with me if I’m kind of scattered. I went down a lot of dead-end streets before killing the malware.

Step One: Download Process Explorer and Process Monitor. These tools were immensely helpful in identifying what processes were using up memory and processor.

I ran Processor Explorer and soon saw the parent Explorer.exe process had a sub process hiding underneath it called Explorer.exe. Continue reading →

Do I Need to Re-Install Office When I Switch Office 365 plans?

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Do I need to re-install Microsoft Office when I switch Office 365 plans? This was the question I was faced with the other day. Our customer was switching from the discontinued Office 365 Midsize Business subscription to the Office 365 Business Premium plan. Here is what I learned doing this switch-over.

I used the switch plans utility in the Office 365 web control panel. The switch of the licenses was seamless. You can find information here on how to use the switch plans utility.

I thought I was all set! I was wrong. A couple days later our customer complained to me that they were getting pop-ups in their Office applications saying the product was unlicensed.

Office 365 Subscription Has Expired

I was suspicious it was because we had switched plans. Microsoft Access is not included in the Business Premium package. I thought maybe the parts of Microsoft Office that our customer wasn’t paying for would just become disabled and the rest of the suite would work properly.

I tried signing into their office account and switching licenses for the Office suite that was installed but it wouldn’t recognize the new licenses. Continue reading →

Rundll32.exe Using High CPU on Windows 8.1

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I use a Lenovo T440s laptop for my service calls and when I need to do work remotely. My laptop runs Windows 8.1 Professional. I love this laptop and it has proved to be tough as well as extremely fast. I noticed a couple weeks ago that my battery was going dead after about an hour of usage. I also noticed that my cooling fan in the laptop was running louder than normal. I decided to open Task Manger on my laptop to see what the issue was. I soon noticed that a process called rundll32.exe was using around 25 percent of my CPU. I killed the process and everything returned to normal.

Task Manager Windows 8.1 Rundll32.exe

A few days later, my battery was going dead very rapidly. My cooling fan was on almost constantly and was blowing warm air. I opened Task Manger and sure enough, rundll32.exe was using 25% of my CPU again. I killed the process and everything was fine. It wasn’t long and my laptop was doing the exact same thing as I described before. I decided it was time to get to the bottom of this issue. Here is how I troubleshot what program was using the rundll32.exe and in the process was killing my battery.

Step One: I downloaded Process Explorer. This is an excellent tool. It is similar to Task Manager but goes into way more depth on the processes and dlls that are running. I extracted the download and then ran Process Explorer as an administrator.

Step Two: One of the first things I noticed was rundll32.exe was using 23 percent of my CPU again. Continue reading →

Copy Outlook 2007 AutoComplete File to Another Computer or Outlook Profile

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After creating a new Outlook profile in 2007 or 2010 you will notice your autocomplete file will be missing. If you are like me, that autocomplete file is so handy for those email addresses you forgot to save in your address book. Here are the steps to recover your autocomplete file (.NK2 file) !

Step One: Make sure Outlook is closed. Find what the name of the new profile is. Go to Control Panel > User Accounts > Mail > Show Profiles. You will see a list of the Outlook profiles. Make note of the profile you are using.

Step Two: Outlook stores your autocomplete email address in a cache called a .NK2 file. Locations different slightly on where the .NK2 file is stored but you will find the file under one of these paths. Go to Drive C: on your computer and browse to C:\Users\ <username>\appdata\Roaming\Microsoft\Outlook or C:\Users\ <username>\appdata\Local\Microsoft\Outlook.

.NK2 File

Step Three: You should see two .NK2 files. One for your old Outlook profile and one for your new Outlook 2007 or 2010 profile.

Step Four: Cut your new Outlook profile’s autocomplete file and paste it on your desktop. Make note of the name of the autocomplete file.

Step Five: Go back to your old Outlook profile’s autocomplete file and right-click on it. Select rename and rename the old autocomplete file to the name of the new autocomplete file.

Step Six: Open Outlook and create a new email. You should see all your autocomplete addresses populating!

This was posted by techspeeder.