My PC was behaving sluggishly the other day. I tried to be patient, but had to fire up the task manager when I could bear it no longer. That’s when I noticed great gobs of my swap file allocated to “SVCHOST.EXE”:

The problem is, SVCHOST is a catch all windows service container. Meaning, many windows services run under the same instance of SVCHOST. How was I going to figure out which services might be the culprit?

Enter the tasklist command.

Tasklist displays info about running tasks, including SVCHOST.

Simply running tasklist at the command prompt displays a laundry list of all running processes. This wasn’t going to do it, so I ran it with the “/?” switch to try and find how to narrow the info…

/SVC Displays services hosted in each process.
/FI filter Displays a set of tasks that match a given criteria specified by the filter.

Looks good so far, now I need to know what filter to apply:

Filters:
    Filter Name     Valid Operators           Valid Value(s)
    -----------     ---------------           --------------------------
    IMAGENAME       eq, ne                    Image name

OK, this gives us:

“C:\>tasklist /svc /FI “IMAGENAME EQ SCVHOST.EXE”

But it seems the filter is case sensitive, because when I run that command, I get this:

INFO: No tasks are running which match the specified criteria.

So, switching to lower case gives me what I want:

“C:\>tasklist /svc /FI “IMAGENAME EQ svchost.exe”

Image Name     PID        Services
=========== =====  =======================
svchost.exe     744        DcomLaunch
svchost.exe     844        RpcSs
svchost.exe     888        AeLookupSvc, AppMgmt,
                                    AudioSrv, BITS, Browser,
                                    CryptSvc, dmserver,
                                    EventSystem,lanmanserver,
                                    lanmanworkstation, Netman,
                                    Nla, RasMan, Schedule,
                                    seclogon, SENS,ShellHWDetection,
                                    Themes, winmgmt, wuauserv
svchost.exe     928         Dhcp, Dnscache
svchost.exe     976         LmHosts, W32Time
svchost.exe     1772       Net Driver HPZ12
svchost.exe     1816       Pml Driver HPZ12
svchost.exe     2424       TermService
svchost.exe     3312       TapiSrv
svchost.exe     2688       W3SVC

From there, it’s just a matter of shutting down or restarting each of the services listed under the process id 888 ( I got this from taskmanager).

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