Cat and Shanmao's blog

My pc at home was terribly slow to start up and everything on it ran slow. I defragmented but that didn't help. Thought that this was some unavoidable Windows 'bit rot' that causes the MS Windows to eventually consume a huge amount of resources just sitting there and doing nothing.

Then I had the bright idea to check out what was gobbling up my cpu. Turns out the process was 'Osa9.exe'.

A virus? No, it's actually part of MS Office and is designed to load some types of files more quickly. But it has the unfortunate side effects that it's always running in the background and tends to consume a huge amount of your pc's cpu.

The solution is to delete it from your system. This was harmless and immediately solved the performance problem. My pc at home is now quite snappy (relative to what it was before).