Find Out What Is Behind The Scenes With ’svchost.exe’
By Jason Faulkner on Feb 21, 2009 in Daily Tips, Operating Systems | comments(1)
If you look at your Windows Task Manager Processes tab, you will probably see several copies of ’svchost.exe’ running. This is normal and is the process name that your background services run as. If you ever are curious what each one is actually ‘hosting’, here is an easy way to find out.
- Download and run Process Explorer.
- Double-click on a svchost.exe entry.
- Look at the Services tab.
- You should see a list of the respective service names under the ‘Display Name’ column. Click on the entry for more information.
This is a really handy feature to know not only for informational purposes, but for troubleshooting as well. If a certain instance of svchost.exe is eating up a bunch of memory, now you know how to find out what it is doing.

If you run an older computer there are certain services you can safely disable in Windows XP. This won’t make your computer blazingly faster by any means but it will gain you a "few extra horsepower", so to speak.
