13 Host Process for Windows Services? Is this normal?

[kerrymeister]

Hello,

I just wanted to check if my laptop is meant to have 13 separate host processes running the background simultaneously. One of them is using 93MB of memory and I think this might be one the reasons why my laptop keeps overheating.

I thought I'd ask someone first before deleting anything, just in case they are all meant to be there after all.

Many thanks

K

 

[MilesAhead]

You have to look to see what each one is running before you know if you need it to run. It is like the tray the food is on. It doesn't tell you anything that a tray is there other than it holds food. You need to know what service is being run. You can use Taskmanger, process explorer. There are many free utilities that provide process and service information.

You can find lists of services with recommendations which are needed and which not for the general user. One is Black Viper, but there are others. I don't think there's any easy way to avoid reading up. Those tune up programs that do it all for you can mess up your system as easily as tune it.

 

[kerrymeister]

Thanks for your response I'll try one of the programs you recommended and see how I get along. Between Taskmanager and Process Explorer, is there any difference in the accuracy/authenticity of the results?

 

[UsernameIssues]

Thanks for your response I'll try one of the programs you recommended and see how I get along. Between Taskmanager and Process Explorer, is there any difference in the accuracy/authenticity of the results?

The difference is in the info presented...
...both should be "accurate".

See this post.

 

[LMiller7]

13 Instances of svchost.exe is not unusual. At present I have 13. It will vary according to the situation.
Memory usage has nothing to do with temperature.

 

[MilesAhead]

If your Laptop is overheating and you are in High Performance energy profile, try balanced. If already in balanced, get some utilities that show your fan speed and cpu/gru temps. The fans may not be speeding up when things get warm.

 

[kerrymeister]

Thanks again for the info. I did have a program measuring temperature and, as it increases, the fans also speed up. What I can't work out is why the temperature rises so fast, even when there aren't any programs running. I thought it might be dust in the vents but the overheating is not constant. Sometimes it'll be fine; then it will heat up a lot for about 30 mins, before returning to normal again (I'm basing this on the fan speed alone). My guess is; if it was dust in the vents, the overheating and increased fan speed would be constant. No matter though. As mentioned before, I'll see what these host processes are up to and maybe suspending a few of them might solve the problem. I know memory doesn't generate heat but the number of active processes running simultaneously does because the CPU has to work harder, depending on the number of programs it has to run. So much for dual cores...

 

[MilesAhead]

See if you can find temp utilities that show both CPU and GPU. From what you describe it does seem weird behavior. If it does get hot like that(30 minutes for no apparent reason) try to see if there is any clue as to GPU or CPU intensive stuff going on. Depending on the GPU it may "borrow" system memory if it does not come with a lot of dedicated video ram. That might skew the workload in some way I can't figure out yet.

Just look for anything that sticks out as weird.