Find out which services are hogging your computer’s resources
One nice addition to the Task Manager in Windows Vista is being able to find out what those mysterious svchost.exe processes refer to. Windows XP users know exactly what I’m talking about. Finding out why svchost.exe used up a lot of memory was a mystery. Well for starters, svchost.exe is in charge of your services.
But instead of having all your services listed as one process of svchost.exe, Windows Vista has separated this into many different svchost.exe processes. To identify them, simply right click your taskbar and choose Task Manager to open up the Task Manager.
Click on the Processes Tab and check the box beside Show Processes from all Users.
You will then see a ton of svchost.exe processes appear. Right click on one of them and choose Go to Service(s). In my case, I right-clicked the one using the most memory.
You will then be transferred over to the Services tab. The highlighted services will be the one associated with that particular process.
You won’t always end up with one service since some of them work in conjunction with each other. Try another svchost.exe process and your search might be narrower.
You can even stop the service without going into the Services Manager by right-clicking, and choosing Stop Service. Although you might want to make sure you know exactly what the service does and if any other services rely on that particular services.
For some, it may be more convenient to go to the Services Tab first, right clicking a particular Service that you suspect to hog your PC, and choosing Go to Process.
Make sure to be careful when disabling services. Creating a Restore Point might be a good idea. You can also view the tutorial on tweaking with services here.
Still need help? Check out our new forums where you can get an even faster and better response!
April 28th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
If only this would work for Windows XP,
I have a 512mb RAM, I need the extra RAM to perform smoothly on my computer.
April 29th, 2007 at 11:18 am
Windows XP has been out for a long time, so people have identified the useless resource-hogging services already through trial and error. There are plenty of guides online that tell u which services are safe to turn off in XP
May 4th, 2007 at 7:58 am
Does anyone know of any guides that will tell you which services aren’t needed in Vista?
James
May 4th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
The related posts feature should help you. You could check out this post
http://vistarewired.com/2007/02/18/services/
October 15th, 2007 at 7:54 am
You really won’t be able to estimate…and indeed it is not possible to estimate how this site has been helpful to the many novices like me.
Thanks to everyone.
AlbertNg, greater thanks to you. I hope to be one of those your few disciples who will pass on the knowledge I’ve learned from you to everyone who needs it. Thanx a mill.
December 13th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Actually for an XP system there are two ways you can find out what svchost.exe refer to so you can shut down services to get more memory back. Open a command prompt and run this command:
tasklist /svc /FI “IMAGENAME eq svchost.exe
It lists all programs running under each svchost process so you can stop the service with out causing problems (this site - http://www.watchingthenet.com/how-to-identify-what-programs-started-svchostexe-in-windows.html has good instructions on using the command)
The other method (which I use) is to run the program Process Explorer from SysInternals (download here - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/ProcessesAndThreads/ProcessExplorer.mspx) this program is cool because you can just mouse over each svchost process and it will display all the programs running under it.
March 13th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
[...] to me you have already done that. If you’re wondering what svchost is, you can check out here: Find out which services are hogging your computer’s resources | Vista Rewired 2) Your hard drive is always spinning? It could possibly be the indexing service that you may not [...]
March 17th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
[...] Find out which services are hogging your computer’s resources [...]
August 14th, 2008 at 9:30 am
The link in my signature has one of the best tutorials i\’ve seen about the svchost.exe application error. You might check it out.
February 23rd, 2009 at 8:26 am
[...] Full Article [...]