svchost.exe is eating up most to all of my CPU...why?

[flyboy]

I recently bought a new Toshiba laptop with Windows XP
Home. It's got a 2.0GHz Celeron, 256MB RAM, 30Gig HD,
etc. So, as you can see I should be able to run almost
anything (within reason, of course) and not have any
problems with bogging down. However, when the computer is
idle and I have NOTHING running, my processor usage in
task manager jumps to 100% every 10-15 seconds and then
drops down to between 10 and 20%(which is still way to
high for an idle system). Virtually all of that jump is
taken up by one of five or six instances of 'svchost.exe'
that is running. The others are all running normally with
little to no processor usage. I've tried ending process
on that program but then Windows just shuts down and
restarts. This has been going on for about a month now
and I have no idea why. It slows down everything to the
point where even Word falls behind when I'm typing and it
also eats up my battery so that I've only got about an
hour and a half at most when I should be getting two and
a half easily. As you can tell, this is extremely
frustrating, especially when trying to use it for school
and running out of battery halfways through class Any
suggestions or ideas on what is happening and why? Any
help is much appreciated. Thanx in advance!

 

[Paul B T Hodges]

Its interesting you say you have 5 or six instances of svchost, I'd only
expect 4 normally.

Dont go terminating svchost processes unless you know which one is a rogue.
SVCHOST holds the windows xp service tasks, and as you discovered, if you
terminate the wrong one, then xp goes down.

To start with run an antivirus scan over your system since I suspect one or
more of those svchost processes is a virus/trojan, it sounds like you have
one or two too many.

Here's a few sites where you can scan your system for free and download free
stuff to secure your system for the future.

Free online virus scan

http://security.symantec.com/sscv6/default.asp?productid=symhome&langid=ie&venid=sym
Free Anti virus software www.grisoft.com
Free Firewall www.zonelabs.com
Free Adware Blocker http://www.lavasoftusa.com/support/download/
Free malware and spyware cleaner http://www.safer-networking.org/

After eliminating any rogue svchost processes ,you still have a problem,
then we need to find out what services that particular svchost process is
housing.

First in the taskmanager process screen, find the svchost process using the
cpu and make a note of its PID number.

In order to find what services its running you need the tasklist command,
you dont have this in windows xp home edition, but you can download it here,

http://www.computerhope.com/download/winxp.htm

Put it in your \windows\system32 directory.

To run it, from a command prompt

tasklist /svc

It shows all the tasks, just like task manager, but the /svc switch tells it
to list the services tasks that run inside each svchost. Look for the
svchost process with the PID number you made a note of, and note down the
names of the service tasks it's running.

I dont think you have the sc command in xp home, I may be wrong
If you do have it, you can try

sc qc servicetaskname

Where servicetaskname is one of the tasks you noted down.
If it works it will come back with more information including the more
descriptive name of the service.

Post the names of the tasks which are running inside the svchost causing the
problem if the antivirus stuff doesn;t solve it.

Paul