[annika]

hi ! i have problems with the svchost it takes all the power when i try to do something like playing a game or listen to online music or playing a video. and i dont know much about how a pc really works and what to do about it. i am on windows xp home edition have avasti antivirus glad for any help ty

 

[jamiemac2005]

Hey,

You need to check your services:

- Click start
- Click Run
- Type "services.msc"
This will bring up your services (what's making svchost.exe over-run[most likely])

Okay, look in the "Startup Type" column, (if you click the header it will sort them) Anything that says automatic starts when you log in...

Some services however are un-needed
For all the services that say automatic do the following:
- Work our wether it's required or not
> Read the description(click on it and the description will show on the left)
> If this doesn't help you with whether it's needed or not then google it (the service name)

- If you know for sure that the service doesn't need to be started on startup:
> Right click it
> click Properties
> Click the Startup type dropdown and select either "Manual" or "Disabled"
-> Manual is prefered if the service might be needed
-> Only select disabled if the service is suspiciously malware sounding

If you do all that then you may speed up your services, but only do it if you're confident the services are unneeded.

Cheers,
Jamey

 

[bdesmondMVP]

OK, couple things we can do to start digging in to this:

Download Process Explorer (free) from Sysinternals (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx). Unzip it somewhere and start it up.

On the options menu, check "Hide When Minimized", and then minimize the program. You should see a new black box down in the tray by the clock with a graph moving on it.

When you have this issue, double click that icon to bring up process explorer, and find the instance of svchost.exe which is consuming the most CPU (look at the CPU column, click to sort), and double click it. There is a services tab. What services are listed?