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I won't be working at the computer, but I'll hear the drive start to softly whirr. Curious as a cat, I will look at the task manager and the process, explorer.exe, will be running. This doesn't happen too often, and I can't actually say how often, but what is explorer.exe doing?
I did a google search asking "what is explorer.exe", and I did get some answers, most of which I really didn't understand ... so I've turned here to C-D where you folks speak English :-)
Why do I have so many instances of explorer.exe? Should I have so many and are they in the right location(s)? If it's not obvious, I'm running XP SP2.
I won't be working at the computer, but I'll hear the drive start to softly whirr. Curious as a cat, I will look at the task manager and the process, explorer.exe, will be running. This doesn't happen too often, and I can't actually say how often, but what is explorer.exe doing?I did a google search asking "what is explorer.exe", and I did get some answers, most of which I really didn't understand ... so I've turned here to C-D where you folks speak English :-)
Why do I have so many instances of explorer.exe? Should I have so many and are they in the right location(s)? If it's not obvious, I'm running XP SP2.
My husband who is the king of computer Guru's says he uses the XP SP2 version on his computer at work...it is not a brand new version but not that old either so explorer.exe should not be running like it is. His suggestion is to make sure that your Virus software is scanning like it should and that you have a current version of virus software.
EXE files are very dangerous to any computer...it stands for "Executables"...and anything that is an executable can and will carry a virus very easily. Be careful with these file...I delete them immediately when I see them pop up.
Check out that virus software or if you don't have any, get some!
Explorer.exe is the Windows File Manager. It has to run for Windows to run. If you kill it, all of your icons, start menu, etc, will disappear and nothing will work.
Open Windows Explorer or My Computer and right click on the drive C: icon. In the menu click on Properties. At the bottom of the display box there are two check boxes. If the one pertaining to the Indexing Service is checked the drive is probably running because the system is in the process of indexing.
Indexing is done during idle time so it won't interfere with the operation of the system while you are working on it. Indexing requires that the hard drive is running since is reading it and writing to it.
I show four instances of explorer.exe on my PC. Three match yours, one is for Bluetooth.
Now that I'm actually aware that explorer.exe has been constantly running, using 1-2% of my CPU, I've become more curious. I randomly chose one of the instances of explorer.exe I have, the one in windows\system32\dllcache and found it entered my machine on 6-13-2007. I ran a search of my C drive to see what other items have the same date. Below is a snapshot of what I found, and most seem related to the SP2 that I probably downloaded and installed on that date. I know, I know, an AOL file is there and we all know how most of the world feels about AOL :-)
Obviously explorer.exe is a necessary function. And I guess I can presume it's running in the background doing its indexing thing to keep tabs on the task bar, desktop icons, file locations, and all the other important aspects mentioned. I'm also assuming that no one sees any red flags as to the locations in which I found explorer.exe, and since I'm not having any computer troubles, I should just let sleeping dogs lie?
Frankly, I wouldn't worry about it. You can open up task manager and look at the processes tab to see what is running at any point. I don't like CTFmon to run as it does seem to slow things down.
I don't think you mentioned it; are you running Vista? If yes are you using a USB mouse? If yes look for updated drivers for the mouse.
My wife's new laptop ran constantly. She got an updated driver for the mouse and it stopped. She showed me a page with a list of USB mice that needed a driver update. It was a long list.
I'm running XP SP2, and yes I do have a USB mouse that's actually attached to the mouse port with an adaptor. All components of my computer are ancient and perhaps indeed the drivers need updating.
Thank you to everyone here with your sound advice -- thus, I'm not fretting about it. However, I will keep an eye on explorer.exe and if it begins to work harder and more often and use more CPU space, then I'll deal with it more thoroughly.
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