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 →

How to Manually Move Your Mozilla Firefox Profile From one Computer to Another

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Problem: Mozilla Firefox has this awesome account synchronization feature. This feature, called Firefox Sync, syncs your bookmarks, passwords, add-ons, tabs, preferences and history to other devices with a Firefox installed. However, I ran into an issue recently that a computer died and the user was using Firefox. This user hadn’t set up a Firefox Sync account so I couldn’t sign into his account to get all his bookmarks and history, etc. Here is how to move a Firefox profile manually from one computer to another. Please follow the instructions carefully, it can be slightly tedious.

Step One: We first need to grab the Firefox profile off the old computer or hard drive. On the old computer, browse to (Windows XP) C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles; (Windows 7,8, 8.1) C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles. You will find under the Profiles folder a xxxxxx.default profile.

Firefox Profile

Old Firefox Profile

Copy the Firefox profile folder to a flash drive or network location.

Step Two: Go to your new computer. Install Mozilla Firefox. If you are running Windows 7 or 8/8.1 go to C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles. Under the Profiles folder you will find a profile name (normally a string of numbers and letters with .default at the end). Continue reading →