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I have a Dell Inspiron 15, running Windows 7. A while back I noticed my computer started lagging every few minutes. This affects only video as audio works fine. The lags stops if I move the cursor, or press any button.

At first, I didn't care much, since I noticed it came and went. The weird part though was that it only happened when I was home, and not anywhere else. A friend then suggested it might have something to do with my WiFi. So I disconnected, and lo and behold, the lagging stopped.

I tried monitoring the Task Manager to see what changes during the lags, and I saw that the dwm.exe process memory usage jumps to 200 MB, which might be the cause of the problem.

I tried disabling Aero, but it didn't do anything. Someone suggested to copy the dwm.exe file from another Win7 laptop, but that sounds a bit risky.

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  • dwm is most likely not the cause for your network-problems: howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/…
    – akira
    Sep 15, 2014 at 10:48
  • There is really no such thing as "process memory usage". (For example, at a minmimum, processes use both physical memory and virtual memory and typically in different amounts.) Can you be more precise about what exactly you are measuring, how exactly you are measuring, and how it changes?
    – David Schwartz
    Sep 15, 2014 at 10:56
  • i uploaded before\after lags screenshots imgur.com/6KWpR8K,jHWFa07#0 @akira i read that before, and it says dwm.exe should take 30-50MB, and mine takes 200MB once lags starts
    – user4041330
    Sep 15, 2014 at 12:15
  • @user4041330: technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653 is able to show you "properly signed" process-images, it will make such fake-processes much easier to detect. since it seems to be a fake-dwm.exe: well done.
    – akira
    Sep 15, 2014 at 14:05

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Scan for malware.

Look closely at the bottom of your first image. There's another dwm.exe. Also, notice that the big one is a 32-bit process.

You appear to have some program that's called dwm.exe but isn't the system dwm.exe because it's 32-bit and the system one is 64-bit. That's almost certainly malware.

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  • He can also enable the command column in Task Manager to check where is the false dmw.exe running from (the one with *32).
    – Marcelo
    Sep 15, 2014 at 12:22
  • Yes, kill it and delete it but it is likely that the source of the infection is somewhere else and it will spawn the malicious executable again, somewhere else or even with a different name. Use antivirus(es) to check the whole disk and hijackthis to check what do you have starting at boot time.
    – Marcelo
    Sep 15, 2014 at 13:04

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