svchost.exe hogging CPU

I have this strange problem where i can hear my hard drive
reading/writing every second, then stopping, then starting again
continuously.
When i look at the process list i see svchost.exe is using between 10
and 30% CPU which i do not think is normal.
Can anyone help?
Vista Ultimate 64 SP2 v. 113 (problem did not start with evaluation SP)

 

You might want to get Process Monitor freeware from SysInternals. If
fact there should be a SysInternalsSuite for download on most freeware
sites and on the MS hosted home page. svchost.exe launches other
services so to see what is hogging what resource you have to see what it
is loading or doing etc..

I have 32 bit Vista Home Premium on an HP PC that I bought in April
2007 and I'm still turning stuff off!!! It's just about at the level
now where the drive only runs on for a few minutes right after I create
a restore point. But it used to just go on by itself for 20 minutes on
end!! Turned a bunch of services off including Windows Indexing and
also you have to hunt down hidden scheduled tasks to see what other
stuff you don't use but the system wants to run anyway is scheduled to
run.

 

Thanks for the tips, the weird thing is this just started recently,
indexing is off, as well as automatic defrag. will check out that tool
from sysinternals, but im thinking about just re-loading soon anyway.

Thinking about going to 32 bit version, as apparently uses less ram,
only have 2 gigs currently and ddr3 is so expensive.
Can anyone confirm the ram remark?

 

I'd google generally and see what you get but it does seem weird tha
the activity wasn't there from the beginning. Do you have Windows ho
fixes/updates or whatever they call 'em enabled? Me, I like to put on
fix only if I'm convinced it will help me. I follow the "if it ain'
broke don't fix it" philosophy. Seems I recall someone else mentionin
WmiPrv so if you google you may get some hits

On the 32 bit Vista I'm not sure about the ram usage but one advantag
of running 32 bit is you can use Sandboxie rather than resident shiel
type antivirus. Instead of trying to figure out which software is goo
and which is evil it takes the simpler approach of redirecting dis
writes of "Sandboxed" programs to a folder.. making it very difficul
for malicious software to do stuff like delete your partition. Th
developer won't support 64 bit due to changes in 64 bit Windows tha
won't allow kernel modification or whatever that Sandboxie relies on.
Once you get this problem out of the way you might want to check it out

I think Vista is going to have a tough time reaching critical mas
unless they get away from this syndrome of the system elbowing the use
out of the way to use the hard drive!! It's cart before the horse. :

 

In the Task Manager right click on the svchost instance and pick Go to
service(s). This will open the Services tab with all the services that are
in that svchost instance highlighted with light blue. Next go to the
Reliability and Performance Monitor. Expand the Disk section and watch it
for a while noting the PIDs for the tasks using the disk the most. Go back
to Task manager and find the PIDs. You may have to check the services again.
It may take a while of going back and forth watching what is happening but
you should be able to determine what is using the disk and what it is doing
fairly quickly. Vista using the disk in the background isn't really a
problem. If you look at the IO Priority in the Reliability and Performance
Monitor a lot of the tasks are set to run in the background. They don't
really impact performance at this priority. For the CPU at 10-30% all the
time, that is not normal and would be what I would be looking at.

 

Turning off some of the background tasks may negatively impact your
performance in the long term. Vista does a lot of housekeeping with tasks
running at a low priority. This doesn't really impact foreground
performance. Not letting Vista do the housekeeping may degrade performance
over time. Doing the housekeeping manually means you waste time doing this
when you could be using the computer for something else. Many people don't
have the skills needed to tune up the computer manually. Note that there are
always exceptions to the rule but for the vast majority of Vista users they
are better off letting Vista do what it wants in the background. It's
similar to tuning a car. Very fast custom tuned cars are hard to keep in
tune and the tuning takes up as much time or more as actually driving the
car. For some people that little bit of time driving really fast is worth
the effort. The vast majority would rather have a reliable car that gets
them to work and back.

 

Well, oddly, in WinXP, svchost mainly hogged all of the CPU when
checking for updates. This issue was "kind-of" resolved with SP3, but I
can't promise anything for Vista, but it's worth a shot... temporarily
atleast.

Turn off Automatic Updates if you haven't already, and maybe just check
for updates every now and then before you fall asleep. Seemed to work
for me for the longest time, but like I said... that wasn't Windows
Vista.