Your computer is bogged down, so you open Task Manager and check the processes tab. There’s the culprit: Svchost.exe. Svchost.exe represents many different services, however, so it doesn’t really tell you what’s causing the problem.

In Windows Vista, you can easily determ determine which specific service is using resources. Just follow these steps:

1. Right-click the taskbar, and then click Task Manager.

2. Click the Processes tab.

3. Click Show processes from all users. Then, respond to the UAC prompt.

4. Click the CPU column heading to sort by the busiest process.

5. If the process is Svchost.exe, right-click it, and then click Go to Service(s). You can do this for any process, but it won’t work correctly if the process isn’t a service.
6. From the Services tab, check the Description column of the selected row to identify the service. You can right-click the service and then click Stop service to stop it.

You can also identify a process from the service by right-clicking the service on the Services tab and then clicking Go to Process.