Ivan, I have 7 svchost.exe’s running right now but they’re drawing about 22K.
I need to corner and kill a similar problem and it will drive you nucking futs. Reading with interest here…
I run a Hitman program from time to time. For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s a bunch of freeware stuff strung together. For instance, Ad-Aware, Spybot, and other stuff have been available for free for a long time. You could get them individually and update/execute each selectively, but Hitman coordinates them. When you click to update, it updates them all; then you start it, and it automatically executes one after the other. When it finishes, it can automatically shut off the computer as well, so it’s the sort of thing you can start before going to bed.
In my case, I don’t think it’s malware etc. I probably have way too much shit on the start menu. I’m going to have to add this as a weekend project.
Internet Explorer is sometimes a culprit. I use tabbed browsing and sometimes when the puter slows down, I go into task mgr. I think when it starts it might be drawing 40K. Right now it’s 58K. I’ve seen it up at 200K and climbing for no apparent reason when the puter becomes unresponsive.
I suspect it’s because there are pop ups running…for instance I go into imdb to look up something and that goddamn “Classmates.com” ad pops up. Well it gets shoved into the background but it’s still there. So I kill it, but no joy: task mgr shows IE still sucking mammary, er, memory, like a wild child at mama’s titty. WTF?
If I kill IE completely, then reopen it, ok, it’s pulling more like 35K.
Right now, I see CPU usage at 5% but PF usage at almost 1Gb. This, I know, is bad. I’m not intentionally running lots of programs but have 68 processes.
Someone will be along to correct me but back in the day (Windows 98) some fixes were:
- Clean off your desk top (I need to do that, badly).
- Clean out your temporary internet files (and set your browser so it doesn’t store cookies forever)
- Take programs that you don’t use off the startup menu.
- Defragment the hard drive.
- Run anti-virus (etc.) software.
If all these fail, set fire to the damn thing, claim it on your insurance, and buy a new one. After backing up your data on an external hard drive, I mean.