How to Quickly Find and Calculate a Miner on a PC: Complete Guide

If your computer suddenly starts running slower, making strange noises, or heating up without any apparent reason, it may be infected with a hidden miner virus. These sneaky programs use your hardware’s power to mine cryptocurrencies, leaving your system overloaded and your hardware wearing out faster. It’s important to detect and remove the miner as early as possible — every day of delay costs your computer resources.

4 Main Signs of Infection

Before searching for and removing the malware, you need to determine if it’s even there. Here are the main “red flags”:

CPU running at maximum capacity. Open Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) and check CPU load. If it stays at 60% or higher without you opening any heavy applications, it’s a warning sign. The miner is constantly consuming resources in the background.

Graphics card sounds like a fan. The GPU starts humming loudly, the cooler spins as if in an airplane, and the graphics card becomes painfully hot. Use the free program GPU-Z to check the exact temperatures — it shows whether your GPU is overheating.

RAM is filled without reason. Mining programs utilize all available resources, including RAM. If your memory is full despite no heavy applications running, look for the culprit.

Laptop acts like a microwave, and internet is slow as a turtle. Constant disk activity, slow internet, sudden disconnections — all indicate a background process sending data over the internet.

Two Types of Malware: Crypto-Jacking and Classic Trojan

Before finding this threat on your PC, understand what you’re dealing with.

Browser-based virus (crypto-jacking). Malicious script embedded directly into a website. When you open an infected page, the script activates and your computer starts mining. The key point: antivirus software often doesn’t detect it because it’s not a file on disk but code in the browser’s memory. You can only notice it by a spike in CPU load.

Classic mining Trojan. A full-fledged program secretly installed on your PC. It runs every time you turn on your computer and operates independently. Sometimes, such Trojans also check your wallets and transfer funds to hackers’ accounts. Dealing with them requires more serious antivirus measures.

How to Diagnose: Find the Miner on Your PC Using Built-in Tools

Using Windows Registry

This is the most reliable way to catch hidden processes:

1. Press Win+R, type regedit, and press Enter.
2. The Registry Editor opens — press Ctrl+F.
3. Enter the names of suspicious processes (e.g., “asikadl.exe” or any strange names from Task Manager).
4. Delete the found entries and restart your computer.

Note: New miners have learned to disguise themselves as harmless system processes. If this method yields no results, proceed to the next.

Using Task Scheduler

Mining malware often hides in startup items, and Task Scheduler can help find it:

1. Press Win+R, type taskschd.msc, and press Enter.
2. Open the “Task Scheduler Library.”
3. Check the “Triggers” and “Actions” tabs in each task.
4. Look for tasks that:
   • Run at every startup
   • Have strange names
   • Launch unknown files from system folders

If you find a suspicious task, right-click → Disable. Check if CPU load normalizes. If yes, delete the task permanently.

Additional Check with AnVir Task Manager

This free program specializes in startup monitoring. It’s easier than the built-in scheduler and often detects what others miss.

Comprehensive Removal of Miner Viruses

If built-in tools didn’t help, use more powerful methods:

Standard cleanup:

1. Run antivirus scans (preferably multiple).
2. After scanning, run Ccleaner to clean residual files.
3. Reboot your system.

If the virus persists:

1. Boot into Safe Mode (press F8 or Shift during startup).
2. Repeat antivirus scans in Safe Mode.
3. Check the registry and Task Scheduler in Safe Mode.

Advanced option: Use specialized antivirus like Dr. Web — it performs deep system scans and can remove even complex Trojans hiding in system folders. Before full scan, create a system restore point — useful if something goes wrong.

Building Protection: How to Prevent Miners from Returning

After removal, make your PC a fortress:

At the OS level:

• Set strong passwords for Windows and disable remote access.
• Keep Windows updated — patches often fix vulnerabilities exploited by malware.
• Limit open ports in your firewall and antivirus settings.
• Use secpol.msc to create policies allowing only trusted software to run.

At the browser level:

• Enable mining protection in Chrome settings (under “Privacy and Security”).
• Block JavaScript — this stops browser-based crypto-jacking but may break some sites.
• Install AdBlock or uBlock extensions to block malicious scripts.

At the network level:

• Use a strong Wi-Fi password.
• Disable remote management features on your router.
• Add malicious sites to your hosts file (there are lists on GitHub for this).

Ongoing monitoring:

• Scan all downloaded files with antivirus before opening.
• Reinstall a clean Windows image every 2-3 months — a radical way to avoid persistent issues.
• Avoid visiting suspicious sites without SSL certificates (address should start with https://).

Now you know how to find a miner on your PC at any level — from initial signs to advanced detection. The key is not to delay: each day of infection costs your hardware resources and, literally, its lifespan.