Okay, what's the point of this?

[The Seventh]

I swear, i have like, 5 of the same process (only difference is size) called svchost.exe.

Please, anyone who knows computers, explain the importantce of 5 of the same process, the potential variance in it, and wether I can delete it.  It's bogging my cpu down...

[Doodle]

What the? I have 8... o_o

[Mario583]

I have two rundll32 (384K and 468K)

[Spud]

So What Is It?

According to Microsoft: "svchost.exe is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries". Could we have that in english please?

Some time ago, Microsoft started moving all of the functionality from internal Windows services into .dll files instead of .exe files. From a programming perspective this makes more sense for reusability... but the problem is that you can't launch a .dll file directly from Windows, it has to be loaded up from a running executable (.exe). Thus the svchost.exe process was born.

Why Are There So Many svchost.exes Running?

If you've ever taken a look at the Services section in control panel you might notice that there are a Lot of services required by Windows. If every single service ran under a single svchost.exe instance, a failure in one might bring down all of Windows... so they are separated out.

Those services are organized into logical groups, and then a single svchost.exe instance is created for each group. For instance, one svchost.exe instance runs the 3 services related to the firewall. Another svchost.exe instance might run all the services related to the user interface, and so on.


Sauce

[Psilocybin]

It's the system processes process.
Services like the plug and play, starting a program when you plug stuff in, internet, system stabilty, etc depend on them.
Don't kill them, you'll break your computer.

I'll repeat, don't kill them.

Start>Run>services.msc
To see services running, ones that start automatically, and to stop them.
Carefull what you stop there.