When I start my pc, (Nobara 43) Memory is up to 70% usage. I dual boot, but use Windows like 5% of the time. I have a Swap partition (64gb), but it shows 0b usage. Is it safe to kill the windows process? Can anyone shed some light into whats going on? I was starting to think this is sketchy lol

  • thermogel@lemmy.mlOP
    1·
    2 hours ago

    Thanks, this is useful info. It doesnt appear to be restarting itself after I killed the process. Is this a good sign?

    • deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de
      2·
      2 hours ago

      This doesn’t really say much; this could be legitimate software thinking it crashed, or it could be malware trying to hide itself.

      Try seeing if sudo find / -type f -name windows tells you anything about where it’s installed. This command searches through / (all files) to find a file (-type f) that is named windows (the same as the process name).

        • deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de
          6·
          1 hour ago

          Heavily leaning towards malware; normal software tends to name itself the same on disk and in ram, this seems to be it trying to hide itself.

          Since there’s now nothing to go off of for how this got on your system, the best course of action is to back up your documents and reinstall your system fresh. To avoid malware in the future, stick to the built-in app store and system repositories where possible.

          • Victoria@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            1·
            6 minutes ago

            See my top-level comment, but WinBoat does seem to set the process name for its Windows VM to “windows”.

            Now if WinBoat is not used here, I agree this might be malware.

    • Malix@sopuli.xyz
      1·
      2 hours ago

      it’ll probably be back running once you reboot. better find out where on your storage it is, why is it starting and where did it come from.