Many computers are part of my business and personal life. My main office computer is a Linux Mint 20.x machine which used to have Windows 7 installed. Linux does well on it the majority of the time but today it was slow and the hard drive LED was solid most of the time. I had an idea what was causing it, but I wanted proof. The hard drive had plenty of room so it wasn’t the problem when I checked in Disks utility.

Next, I tried a utility for displaying every process and it’s related information like CPU percentage, disk reads, etc.  The two criteria I use most for investigating is the CPU and memory.  In this instance, my virus scanner was using the most memory of any process on the entire computer.  It was probably running the daily scan and when I looked closer there were two active windows of it running and one was frozen.  It displayed “Please wait” at the bottom of the window and it wouldn’t respond when I clicked on the “Cancel” button. I went to System Monitor and deleted the virus scanner process and now the computer is much faster.

System Monitor can be found under the Administration category of Linux Mint programs.  Try it out and let me know how it works for you.  Microsoft Windows has a similar utility name Task Manager and I use it as well on my Microsoft Windows computers.