[Jenesis87]

I noticed this today and I want to know if it's part of Vista and a deliberate feature or if my PC is being weird.

Right now I am doing nothing except using Mozilla (typing this message) and looking at the Task Manager processes window. There are no less than thirteen instances of svchost.exe running all at once, using varying degrees of memory - smallest is 236k, largest is 100,644k.

Of those thirteen instances, seven are run by 'SYSTEM', four by 'LOCAL SERVICE' and three by 'NETWORK SERVICE'. The one using 100,000k of memory is the most memory-intensive process running on my PC, out-stripping even firefox.exe by a multiplication factor of three.

Is this normal?

(Edit: Typo.)

[devil_himself]

Shvost or Svchost >> Please Verify

Also you can download 'Process Explorer' From Sysinternals to look what is running under them

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys...sexplorer.mspx

[Jenesis87]

Whoops, typo! It is Svchost.

ETA: I ran Process Explorer, and it gives me this. I only copied the bit showing svchost. I'm afraid I don't understand the program (Process Explorer), what is it telling me, and how does it answer my question?

[devil_himself]

They all Belong to MS >... If you Will Hold Your Mouse Over it it Will tell you the Services or programs running under it

[ostlandr]

That would seem to explain some of the general Vista problems we're all having.

Right now, I have sixteen instances of svchost.exe running, various memory usages, and one is using 33 MB. IE 7 is only using 44 MB (to view just this one web page.)

IE 7 is the only app running at the moment.

All in all, it's eating up 53% of 2 GB physical memory (Vista home premium.) To view one web page.

At simple tasks like downloading and unzipping files, this new CPU with AMD Athlon TM 64 X2 dual core 3800+ processors is slower than the old XP box.

SimCity 4 ran much better than on the old PC-, even at high detail settings- until it crashed.

All our other games won't run, or crash at random intervals (more likely as time goes on- for example, Diablo 2 is known to have a memory leak in Vista.)

[Jenesis87]

Ah I forgot to check total memory usage. Right now (only open app is Firefox) 1GB of my 2GB of RAM is being used.

WTF, Microsoft?

In answer to previous post, running Process Explorer and mousing over things, quite a lot of the instances of svchost.exe govern things like ReadyBoost, Tablet PC Input and Task Scheduler, none of which I use or want running, and most of them govern processes of which I have no idea what they are ("KtmRm for Distribution Transaction Coordinator", "Superfetch", "Windows Image Acquisition" and similar).

[katabby]

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pro...uperfetch.mspx
the reason for so much memory use. Some say its a good thing. Some folks disable it. Don't know why.

[ostlandr]

Originally Posted by katabby

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pro...uperfetch.mspx
the reason for so much memory use. Some say its a good thing. Some folks disable it. Don't know why.

Well, if "superfetch" is supposed to speed things along, then it ain't doin' what it's meant to do. The new machine with the dual-core AMD Athlon TM 64 X2 3800+ and 2GB of RAM is slower at just about everything than this old Wal-Mart special XP box with the single AMD XP 1800+ (1.53 ghz) and 256 MB of RAM. I mean, stupid tasks like unzipping a file take forever.
This computer (HP Pavillion 304w) said "designed for Windows XP" but it needed another 128 MB of RAM to run properly- otherwise it was constantly in virtual memory. But it ran, and I had exactly one compatibility issue that couldn't be fixed.

[katabby]

I have 2gb ram and about half of it is being used to write this reply. However, my computer still runs fast.
I think you may have other problems. One common problem is power options. Find power options in the control panel and check the box for high performance. Here is a link for some Vista tweaks but do only the ones you are comfortable with.
http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/supertweaks.htm

[ostlandr]

Those are some excellent tweaks! Will try those tomorrow. Thanks!