svchost.exe

Many a times you get frustrated when your system hangs or lingers on so slowly and the prime reason for this is that there are too many processes running and you don’t have enough control with Windows Task Manager. While in the midst of development or you’re about to finish with your Photoshop you seriously can not to afford to loose any data just because of the shitty hang process. What you could have done here? Probably free up some resources; atleast you won’t be needing many network related services that are eating up your resources. But how would you do it since Windows Task Manager isn’t the ultimate answer… as it doesn’t allow me to suspend or pause a particular process and then resume it when I am done with memory or CPU extensive work.

The good answer to such a problem is “Process Hacker” (download Process Hacker). Process Hacker open source feature-packed great tool for altering and manipulating processes and services on your computer. After successfully setting up this tool you can terminate, suspend, resume, restart and prioritize processes. Processes are highlighted to provide additional information such as whether they are elevated or in a job.

Here are features that need appreciation:

You can customize the tree view and sort the columns
Get detailed performance graphs. While you take your mouse to any peak of the graph it show info for which process or service has created that peak and how much percent it has utilized of CPU and memory
A complete list of Processes, Services and Network services giving ultimate control to terminate, start, stop, pause and resume them
You can check performance of each individual process along with its thread listing and stacks with dbghelp symbols, token information, module and mapped file information, virtual memory map and environment variables
You can find hidden processes running in the background and even kill them as well.

There are many more features that you can find on its website. Now I will take you through the screenshot tour of Process Hacker:

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PS: Note that previously we posted on how to analyze svchost.exe with svchost process analyzer; this process hacker can be used as a better substitute since it has many features. Good luck with your process killing

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When ever you do ctrl+alt+del and switch to Processes in Windows Task Manager, you for sure see svchost.exe even though you’re finding something else. Don’t you ponder what the heck is this svchost.exe and shoould i kill this? You may think of killing of this process if your system is frozen and clogged with too many processes. In this post we will see what is svchost.exe and is it safe to kill the process.

So, what is svchost.exe
The file svchost.exe is the Generic Host Process for Win32 Services used for administering 16-bit-based dynamically linked library files (DLL files) including other supplementary support applications. As operating systems became more complex Microsoft decided to run more software functionality from a dynamic link library (DLL) interface. However DLLs are unable to launch themselves and require at least one executable program, i.e. svchost.exe, is needed to bridge between the library process and the operating system.

Many instances of SVCHOST.EXE:
There may be many instances of svchost.exe and be cautious that not all instances are legitimate. It may be registered as a backdoor process installed for malicious purposes by an attacker, a trojan or a stealth monitoring software. I am also skeptical why so many instances are running at my PC :S. Analyze it with some tool:

Analyze with Svchost Process Analyzer
The windows task manager only provides this much info which you’re seeing above or you normally see with your task manager. If you need to analyze it further,which you should do, then Svchost Process Analyzer is a good tool. It is a free light and portable tool that does not require installation and comes in handy to tell you what multi-svchost processes are doing? Basically, each instance of svchost.exe masks a series of Windows system services. Svchost Process Analyzer lets you figure out exactly what those processes are. If you find some running processes that you don’t think you need, you can disable those services using the Windows Control Panel to free up some system resources. Here is the screen shot for svchost process analyzer:

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