Process Explorer Makes the Nice List
For helping me resolve a oh-so-typical Windows problems, Process Explorer is added to my Nice List.
Today, my Windows XP PC seemed both sluggish and to be running hotter than normal. The task manager was consistently showing my processor running at 100%, and revealed that one of the svchost processes was the culprit.
In the past, I’ve found such issues to be related to an update that some program (often from Adobe) wanted to perform. Upon removing the useless items from the startup with msconfig, the problem was usually resolved. (Adobe applications have a bad habit of inserting themselves back into the startup list on a regular basis.) Not so today.
Unfortunately, the Windows XP task manager will identify that svchost is consuming the processor, it doesn’t identify which of the many processes that are running is the problem.
However, Process Explorer does.
Once I downloaded and ran this nifty tool, within mere moments I was able to identify the service was started with this command line:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\svchost.exe -k HPService
A google search then identified this further as “HP Network Devices Support”, a service that monitors network printers for changing IP addresses. Since my network printers have fixed IP addresses, I don’t need this service. It was then a “simple” matter to turn the service from “automatic” to “manual”.
And now, voila, my PC is cooling off and running better again, and I can get back to what I really wanted to do today.
January 27th, 2010 at 3:31 pm
I love Process Explorer. It came in particularly handy at my last job. The stuff those corporate IT hacks made my little laptop try to juggle made it so hard to get work done. It’s also handy for pausing processes that you may want to allow to finish eventually, but need to leave you alone for a while.