Windows – svchost.exe eating CPU: which of these services can be the cause

servicessvchostwindows xpwindows-services

Thanks to these awesome instructions I was finally (!) able to identify the services of the svchost.exe process which eats so much of my CPU on my Windows XP Professional SP3 (Version 2002):

Process                   PID    Services
========================= ====== =============================================
svchost.exe                 5516 BITS, EventSystem, Nla, RasMan, SENS,        
                                 ShellHWDetection, TapiSrv, W32Time, winmgmt, 
                                 wuauserv

Now:

  1. Which of these services can potentially be the cause of the problem?
  2. Shall I now try to stop some of them?
  3. If yes, which of these services can be stopped safely and which is better not to stop at all? (Without destabilizing the system)
  4. How can I manage the services? Using services.msc? The problem with services.msc is that I have localized Windows and I see all of them translated. Is there any way I can match and stop/start the corresponding service with the english names provided above?

Thanks a lot!

PS: producing the above output to find the services of the greedy svchost.exe process was tricky on my localized Windows, since the /fi filtering on process name didn't work (the filter commands itself are translated to czech and it's not possible to enter them on the console due to charset issues!!! Braindamaged M$!!!). This is how I did it:

  1. tasklist /v > c:\tomas\file.txt
  2. Find the PID of the proper svchost process by memory usage.
  3. tasklist /svc /fi "PID eq 5516"

PS: this is not a duplicate of #995581 at all, it's not about data but CPU consumption, also svchost issues were so frequent that it deserves it's own specific question, which is also about specific services. That question wouldn't solve my problem at all.

Best Answer

First of all: Don't use Windows XP. This is an accident waiting to happen.

That said, I am nearly certain, that wuauserv is the culprit: Windows Update is completely broken with Windows XP, and it no longer servers any purpose. Try net stop wuauserv to make sure.

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