svchost.exe

On an old XP system I can see several processes called svchost.exe that are running most of which have CPUloads of zero and total time in seconds. However, there is one instance that comes up and runs regularly and it takes 50% of CPU time for up to an hour! I can end te process and nothing untoward happens. Then a few hours later the same one will start again ...

Is there anyway to find out what is initiating the process? There is no defined start time or frequency that I can identify. No malware on te machine and no unwanted effects except the CPU load.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/list-serv...

Have tried one of their methods and get:

svchost.exe 4412 BITS, EventSystem, helpsvc, Nla, RasMan, Schedule, SENS, TapiSrv, Themes, W32Time, winmgmt, wuauserv

So, 12 potentials for the one process (PID) and no way to really find out which one is causing the problem. !

I think you will only see the usage for all services under that svchost, but it's probably Windows Update (wuauserv). If you disable Windows Update, reboot, and CPU usage stays low, then that's it.

I had that on an old XP machine after the Windows Updates were supposed to be stopped - stopping update running sorted it

Yes, disabling it in Control Panel should work, but otherwise startup type can be set to Disabled in Services for "Windows Update".

Got any scheduled tasks? Indexing enabled? Probably something like that.

Thanks all ...


Have PC running and no excessive usage at present. I have a list of the utilities and processes using svchost and will wait until I get a high CPU load then another snapshot to see the difference which may narrow it down.

I believe have Windows update OFF on that machine, but Microsoft update ON will need to check though.

Disabling startup of telephony and remote access services will kill two of those processes, which might help.

Microsoft did introduce a buggy version of the update server that chewed up the CPU and took hours to run to completion. It caused me endless problems on Windows 7. They eventually managed to fix it. Of course, it meant running the update service to install the fix.