Wednesday, February 28, 2018

excess CPU usage from Windows Update Agent

Noticed that an SVCHost process was taking up 50% CPU on my 2-core Windows XP machine. This behaviour started around a week back. Killed the process, ran Trend Micro's House call online anti-virus, did not detect anything. If I directly kill the SVCHost process itself, sometimes it disables audio - that thread is also on that process. Googling for solutions, got one way to do it using process explorer. 




Right-clicking the process and going to properties, in the threads tab, we see that Windows Update Agent is the culprit - killing or suspending it stops the high CPU usage.

There are some posts about solutions, like

but apparently this particular problem was fixed already,


"The problem that the "Symptoms" section describes was corrected in Windows Update Agent 3.0 and in update 927891. These updates were distributed through Microsoft Update in June and July, 2007. If you are still experiencing a problem that resembles the one that this article describes, it may be a different problem. To troubleshoot similar problems, please see the "Similar problems and resolutions" section later in this article."

So, currently I will just live with suspending the thread. 

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