FastRabbit
36 D'Aubigny Road N3T 6J2 Brantford, ON, Canada

Giving the old Vista laptop a tuneup tonight and came across something interesting. Obviously support for Vista has discontinued so that Windows Defender no longer works and windows updates are no longer available. I decided on Avast for a new functional free antivirus but the computer was really sluggish and task manager revealed 50 to 80 percent cpu usage. I instinctively blamed Avast but the problem persisted after an uninstall ... svhost.exe was running like crazy and o...verheating my old machine. I tracked the problem with task manager from processes through to the services and found Vista was still trying to do automatic updates (wuauserv) although there were none available. I shut off automatic updates in control panel and the cpu went from a consistent 50 to 80 percent activity to 5% and stayed there. Sad that Microsoft allows this software malfunction to happen because it essentially disables a usable computer that they no longer want to support. It's more like something I would expect from Apple.

FastRabbit Computing is an open Facebook page dedicated to helping people have fun building computers. Help others by posting your homemade computer build here.

Never think that old means weak. My new toy beats the pants off of one of the best CPUs available ... an i7 6950x (10 core 20 thread) monster which sells for $2256 on newegg.ca I bought an older Lenovo D30 workstation with an E5 2680 CPU (8 cores 16 threads) and because the motherboard takes 2 CPUs, I was able to purchase a second identical CPU and install it for 16 cores and 32 threads total. The specs on this computer are listed below with 32GB of DDR3 memory and the secon...d best commercially available video card, an Nvidia GTX 1070. All told for around with some careful searches on kijiji Ontario and ebay this was a great deal for me as I have a computer with the horsepower of pc that would cost thousands more ... 4K gaming here I come.

Computer Hope is a good reference source for free information. http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/p/post.htm