How can you tell which system processes are viruses?

Question

And which are not when you go to control panel..thanks in advance.

Answer 1

After closing all open windows, you can try searching for any suspicious-seeming processes on Google or at http://www.liutilities.com/products/wintaskspro/processlibrary/

You can also try searching for the process name at antivirus websites like Symantec.

Answer 2

good way to spot a virus: make sure your computer is clean first, reinstall windows, virus scan all that sort of stuff. now when ure sure its clean go into task manager and go to the processes tab check the box at the bottom, now write down all the processes that are there. now whenever a new one comes up such as a new program installed or summin type the name into google and search for it, you will get some results on it. eg svchost.exe in google is clean and very important, it will appear many times. If you get virus ones then click them and push delete to close them, that mite be tricky, just use an onaccess virus scanner and it will not allow virus code to run.

Answer 3

also, check to see what processes are running under you (the user's login name)

also, if you have XP...
do a start, run
in the empty box type: msconfig

click the start up tab(should be last one)
In there you can see all the junk programs that start up and run in the background of your PC. Some you can tell from the file path, others just google them. MOST of these are not needed and you'll notice a quicker PC when it logs in.

Answer 4

You can just type the name of the particular process into your web-browser, google it. Links will come up with information about those processes running.