I asked about high cpu for svshost a couple of days ago and if it is any use to anyone I have diagnosed it as Windows Update causing it.As soon as Windows starts updating both IE and svchost increases to about 26,000k-40,000k.

I came across this a year or so ago with a lot of machines at work - svchost was using 100% CPU. Turned out to a be a Windows Update that introduced the bug in the first place. I disabled automatic updates for a while until they rectified it. It's not been a problem since I re-enabled months ago.

I have the same thing, how do I get rid of it ?

Start -> Control Panel -> Automatic Updates -> Turn off Automatic Updates

Obviously you do lose the auto update feature which is not ideal. This is assuming it's this that's causing the problem - I thought it had been fixed a while ago...

Just tried that, then rebooted...

There are still 5 of them running :huh:

svchost.exe is the generic service host for Windows. It should be running and there should be multiple instances of it. However if one of these services goes a bit mental and becomes a resource hog (as the OP mentioned) it will show up as one of the instances of svchost.exe using 100% CPU. That's what the above 'fix' was for - auto update is run through svchost.exe

More info can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314056

Ah, it makes sense now, thanks.

all you need to do is disable automatic updates, apply all the updates from windows update and its fine when you re-enable automatic updates. I found this problem on a batch of 1ghz machines i has a while back. fast processors dont seem to suffer

you need something like Uniblue, SpeedUpMy Pc to rectify CPU hungry programs etc



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