svchosts.exe

[Matt]

When I start my computer up it uses about 210Mb of memory
which I though was unusually high, then wehen I start to
do things on it like browsing the internet and chatting
to friends using instant messenger my memory and procesor
usage is extremely high, I exit the programs yet my
computer has been using 100% of its processor and tells
me it it using up to 800Mb of page file usage. I Have
512Mb of Ram installed and it sometimes says there is
only about 100Mb of this left as the rest of it is being
used, I check the processes it has done and svchost.exe
appears 3 times and on some occasions it is using up to
300Mb of memory, what is this and why is it doing it?
Because of this my computer sometimes runs extremely slow
and tells me that i am running low on memory or virtual
memory.

 

[Michael D. Alligood]

Wow. I have Internet Explorer, Outlook 2003 (with Word as the Editor), and a
newsreader open. I am only using 241 megs of memory. Not bad considering
Office 2003 and Windows XP both love the memory. But I digress...
Svchost.exe stands for Service Host Process. It is an application that works
as a host process for services that run from DLLs. The Svchost.exe file is
located in the %SystemRoot%\System32 folder. At startup, Svchost.exe checks
the services part of the registry to construct a list of services that it
must load. Multiple instances of Svchost.exe can run at the same time. Each
Svchost.exe session can contain a grouping of services. Therefore, separate
services can run, depending on how and where Svchost.exe is started. This
grouping of services permits better control and easier debugging. There is
another program Svchosts.exe that is associated with viruses and spyware
programs. You might want to boot into safe mode and run Ad-Aware or Spybot
and some type of up-to-date anti-virus program.


--
Best of luck!

Michael D. Alligood
MCSA, MCP, CCNA, A+,
Network+, i-Net+, CIW A, CIW CI

 

[Doug Sherman [MVP]]

Michael is almost certainly correct. This is probably a case of
spyware/adware/virus infection. Also, malware may run a counterfeit svchost
file with a 'correct' name from some directory other than System32.

Doug Sherman
MCSE Win2k/NT4.0, MCSA, MCP+I, MVP

 

[Abel]

I recently had the same problem on a client's computer.
At first I thought he needed a processor and memory
upgrade. Then I ran a virus scan at:
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
After that everything seemed to work fine.
Also run Ad-aware to scan for adware.

 

[Matt]

Thanks so much, the problem is now fixed i realised the
difference between the names, one has an s at the end of
it!! the file has gone and system scanned all is well, my
computer is now only using 200Mb of memory as i have a
lot of recording applications running at once which is
good to know my resources aren't being drained, thanks so
much this is the first time i have used this to solve a
problem and it was the quickest and easiest way of doing
it!!
Matt (thanks again!)

 

[Michael D. Alligood]

Anytime Matt!

--
Best of luck!

Michael D. Alligood
MCSA, MCP, CCNA, A+,
Network+, i-Net+, CIW A, CIW CI