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In Windows XP, I see that there are many copies of a process called scvhost.exe, some running as local services, some other as network services and yet some other owned by the system. One of this copies is using up to 50% of the processor (I'm using Windows XP as a Guest OS in VirtualBox with two cores, Host OS is Debian 7), and every time it runs starts throwing high temp alerts. To stop the warnings, I frequently kill the process, and the problem goes away.

So, my questions are:

  • What is this svchost.exe process?
  • Why are there so many copies running?
  • Is it a good idea to kill the process? (Windows seems to work just normally with or without that "cpu-hungry" svchost.exe process running)
  • Can I, somehow, tweak the configuration to stop this "rogue" copy of the process?

I will appreciate any help.

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The svchost.exe process is the Windows Service Host. It is the application in charge of running services (which can be accessed by going to a prompt/run box and typing services.msc). Each executable is tasked with running one or several services (depends on the specific service). There are many copies because there are many services on your computer, and many processes are required to maintain all of them. However, because they're all named the same, it's hard to differentiate the svchost.exe processes from each other. Therefore, it's not exactly safe to just end an svchost.exe process from Task Manager; instead, it's safer to go into the Services management console at services.msc and end services from there, because if you end the wrong process from the Task Manager, you could accidentally kill a number of things, including,

  • Dropbox, Google Drive, or some other file sync software
  • Audio playback and recording capabilities
  • Internet connectivity
  • Daemons, servers, etc.

If you want to stop high CPU load as a result of the Services host, you should consider stopping, or disabling some resources from the Services management console, or uninstall some unnecessary software that might have installed a CPU-intensive service.

Please do note that malware has been known to infect svchost.exe in the past due to its commodity and expected high performance, giving it an ideal place to hide. Therefore, you should also consider running a malware check of some sort.

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