svchost and idle process killing my pc

[adrian2055]

Lately vista has been acting a fool with me and I don't know why. System idle process and svchost.exe use 50% of my resources if I do the smallest things like access my externel hard drive, play an mp3/video with realplayer or use IE8. Sometimes it does this as soon as I get to my desktop. I dual-booted windows 7 tonight to see if it does the same thing and it uses 98% of my resources with only my factory issued drivers installed and updated bios. I don't have any viruses/spyware/malware on the vista install and windows 7 is a fresh install with no programs. I tried 32-bit and 64-bit for both operating systems and the same problem persists. What causes this?

PC Specs:

Acer Aspire 5532 Laptop (Manufactured Jan 2010)

AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-50 1.6 GHz

512KB L2 Cache

3 GB Ram

160GB Hard Drive

15.6 Acer CineCrystyal LCD

ATI Radeon HD3200 Graphics Card :angrym:

Optiarc 8X DVD RW AD-7700S ATA Device

Atheros AR5B93 Wireless Network Adapter

Atheros AR8132 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller

Realtek Card Reader

Realtek HD Audio Device

[cluberti]

The Idle "process" is just that - it's the time the CPU is IDLE, not doing anything, so I'm sure that's not what's causing your CPU issue. However, svchost.exe is a "SerViCe HOST" process that can host multiple (usually similar) services in one binary process (usually to save on resource use, but sometimes also for ease of sharing thread data between two or more services). It would be best to know WHICH svchost.exe process is causing this first (use Process Explorer to try and see inside of it to get an idea of which thread or threads seems to be causing the CPU usage), and we can go from there.

[adrian2055]

Thanks for that link. Process Explorer helped me solve the problem. Panda antivirus was still there (I thought I uninstalled it) and java was casuing issues. Those 2 alone were using nearly 75% of my resources. After i uninstalled them everything's back to normal.

[cluberti]

Good!

[adrian2055]

One more quick question. Based on my settings do you think I should use 32-Bit or 64-Bit? The ram will go up to 4gb and I've already upgraded the proessor. Which one is best for this laptop?

[cluberti]

32bit is fine if you're already using it - if it was a clean build, and all of your software and drivers were known to work under x64 I'd say go 64bit. However, if you're already running 32bit, and you don't plan on upgrading to Win7 x64, staying 32bit isn't really that bad an idea as well.