Posts Tagged ‘English’

svchost taking up 99% cpu usage – a different approach

Montag, Juni 16th, 2008

This weekend I experienced a strange behavior while working with my girlfriends laptop. Right from the startup away all cpu fans worked at full speed (normally these turn on after a while working in office or something else). I wondered why they did so and so I put my hand in front of the ventilation slot regarding that hot air is streaming all out of it.

So I turned on the windows task manager and noticed that an instance of svchost takes up to 99% cpu usage, which causes that the cpu has to work all the time which causes a lot of heat which causes constant fan blowing which causes annoyance to me…

I googled a lot, and in most forums was the solution to reinstall or deactivate the automatic updates on windows machines. I did so and it didn’t solve the problem for me.

I tried to locate the problem in order to fix it by myself. First of all I turned the task managers PID column in the process view on. Open the taskmanager with CTRL+SHIFT+ESC switch to the process tab and click on View->Select columns, check PID and click on OK.

Now its possible to see every ProcessID (PID) of every currently running process. Each process gets an unique ID when started. Note, the process PID isn’t always the same.

Next step ist to open the windows command console, press WIN+R enter cmd and hit enter. Type tasklist /svc and hit enter again. You will receive a list of all currently running services on your machine. Note, Windows XP Home users don’t have the tasklist app, instead of tasklist they can use process explorer in order to see als services (try googling it). Know check the task manager which PID takes up the whole cpu usage write down its PID. Back in the command console window look for the PID you wrote down. Right aside the PID you should see the name of the service.

This is the service which hogs the complete cpu. In my case it was the HP Network Discovering and Configuring Service. Setting the startup type from automatically to manual fixed the problem for me.
If your service isn’t the same, don’t feel disappointed. Knowing which service causes the problem gives you a new starting point in order to fix the problem. Try googling the name of the service, I’m pretty sure other people had the same problem like you before ;)