I was tasked to troubleshoot my brother’s PC since I’m more techno savvy than him. His PC was about two years old and still running on Intel’s single core processor. I thought that maybe this was because his PC has an old hardware and it’s only natural since the more applications you install on an old hardware, the more sluggish it will become.

Well, my brother’s PC was like a bigger version of the ASUS EEE PC. There’s not much application installed and he was only using it to surf the Internet and do basic office applications but I was surprised that even for an old PC, it was running TOO slow. I launched the task manager (ctrl + alt + del) and saw that there’s an unusually high page file usage. As usual, Google has helped me find the solution. Cidaemon.exe was causing the error. I did a few quick searches whether if I turn off cidaemon.exe, it would solve the problem and whether it is safe to turn the process off.

It turns out that cidaemon.exe is a windows process and a problem with this application can cause a high CPU utilization. Turning off cidaemon.exe is usually recommended and even the Microsoft Support Service recommends it as a solution. To turn off cidaemon.exe, just go to any explorer window (or clickon mycomputer), press the search button, click on preferences, click “without indexing service” and select, “no, do not enable indexing service”. And we’re done. Your PC is now running much more smoothly.