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Help: My laptop is acting 'jittery'?

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TommyHolly

Member
Joined
Apr 30, 2003
Location
Chicago
Hey guys,
This is a new problem that I cant figure out how to solve? I was using my laptop just fine all day until I downloaded the latest update for Vista. Now it's been acting 'jittery'.

To describe 'jittery', it's kinda like there is an echo effect every few seconds which slows down and effects all aspects of the PC. If anyone remembers the show "Max Headroom" it is like talking with him. It is most noticeable when I am watching a video however the problem is there even when I simply log in to my desktop? If I was watching a video and someone was speaking it would sound like this: If-if I-I-I was watching a v-v-video and s-s-someone-one w-was sp-sp-speaking it would sound li-li-like this. It isn't constant, but it randomly effects all operations of the PC every few seconds?

To fix it I tried these steps with no luck:
1. Restarted the PC
2. Went into the taskmanager to see if anything was hogging up resources? (nope, nothing)
3. Went to MSCONFIG and shut off everything that boots up and restarted
4. Went into system tools and reset the laptop to a time last week when it worked fine.

HMMM Wait a second... There is something showing up now that wasn't there before? I wonder if it's a virus? In the task manager there is something that is taking up at least 50% of the resources? Here is what it looks like in the different colums in Taskmanager.

svchost.exe, SYSTEM, 53%, 2,776 K, Host Process for Windows Services

Hmmm I don't even know what that is??? But I think I found the problem?


What can I don to get rid of it and maybe identify it? I have Avast Anti-Virus working and updated, Spybot, and Windows Defender all working and I have not had any problems like this for over 7 years??? Can anyone help?
 
svchost is totaly normal. It stands for SerViCe host. You should have a few of them, if you want to know what it is right click and choose go to show Serveces - the highlighted ones are the thing it represents.

What its doing the thing that works out what you use etc, give it a few days and it'll be back to normal. :D
 
zbo is correct, SVChost.exe is a normal process to show up. SVChost is essentially the process that runs/handles the services that run in the background. Follow the process he gave to find out what services correspond to the overly active SVChost and list them off to us. There can be malicious/troublesome services.

The fact that everything is studdering to me would indicate a possible I/O issue. It might be that this overactive services is doing a lot of I/O and causing all other I/O performance to take a hit.

Also right click on My Computer->Manage and look through your Application and System Logs for an recurring errors or warnings that look important/related. One common thing to look out for is Errors from Source: disk.
 
I've had problems with svchost.exe in the past. I think it may have had something to do with my printer. Every once in a while I would screw up my printer and there would be a list of failed print jobs waiting to go. I'm not 100% sure that was causing it, but it seemed like every time svchost.exe was hogging resources I always had failed print jobs backed up as well.

At any rate, I never had any problems when I just ended the process. Nothing bad or disastrous ever happened as a result of simply terminating that svchost process.
 
At any rate, I never had any problems when I just ended the process. Nothing bad or disastrous ever happened as a result of simply terminating that svchost process.

That was a luck of the draw instance. The many svchost processes each control as few as one, or could be many services. If one service is causing a problem, killing the SVChost that controls it will obviously kill the troublesome service, but it may also take down needed services with it.

You could end up taking out your Print Spooler service which would make all of your printers quit working and appear to have "disappeared". You could take out something like your DNS or DHCP client which would more than likely make all of your internet connected software start failing(though not necessarily all of it).

The best thing to do when a service is causing problems, just disable the individual service, not take out the whole svchost that controls it. To disable or stop a service... Open a run prompt (Windows Key + R) and type services.msc then hit enter. From there you can see what services are running, and stop any running service. You can also go into the properties of any service and change it to disabled so that it won't start up on its own.

Just know what you're turning off. If you're not sure what a service does.... Google knows. Or you can PM me.
 
The jittery problems are being caused by the system memory being tasked at 1.38GB!!

I'm still trying to locate the actual source of the problem but there is now something wrong when I try and restart the PC... Arrrgh, I think I may need to wipe my system.
 
The jittery problems are being caused by the system memory being tasked at 1.38GB!!

I'm still trying to locate the actual source of the problem but there is now something wrong when I try and restart the PC... Arrrgh, I think I may need to wipe my system.

So the stuttering probably was I/O. If you're low on free memory but some process still requires more memory, your computer will write out information stored in memory to disk. This is much much slower than the read/write speed of RAM, and often doing lots of I/O to a hard drive (esp when processes are waiting on the I/O to free up memory) will slow down your computer, and in some instances could probably cause the stuttering.

In my experience things like the stuttering almost always have something to do w/ the hard drive.

What are the new symptoms during start up?:confused:
 
The best thing to do when a service is causing problems, just disable the individual service, not take out the whole svchost that controls it. To disable or stop a service... Open a run prompt (Windows Key + R) and type services.msc then hit enter. From there you can see what services are running, and stop any running service. You can also go into the properties of any service and change it to disabled so that it won't start up on its own.

I never knew that svchost.exe was actually a group of other services. That's good to know!

Maybe I did just get lucky, but I had that problem numerous times both on my Windows XP laptop and my desktop. I killed the service many times and I never noticed something else failing to work as a result. It seemed that I could never find an answer that fixed my problem when I googled "svchost.exe", so I just gave up and stopped the service.
 
I never knew that svchost.exe was actually a group of other services. That's good to know!

Maybe I did just get lucky, but I had that problem numerous times both on my Windows XP laptop and my desktop. I killed the service many times and I never noticed something else failing to work as a result. It seemed that I could never find an answer that fixed my problem when I googled "svchost.exe", so I just gave up and stopped the service.

What I think can happen sometime (I don't know this for sure) is when you kill the SVCHost that was overly active.... well the services it controlled could be set to "Automatic Start". So when you kill them, if they're services that are required to be running all the time (there are all sorts of situations where one service depends on another service, so they'll start each other up) they might start themselves back up. So by killing that SVCHost you might effectively be restarting some of the services its controlling, lessening the chance of you really seeing any adverse effect. It could also be that you're restarting the wild service, and after restart, it behaves normally. If the service is set to "Manual Start" it probably won't restart after you kill its assocaited SVCHost

Like I said, it's kind of a crap shoot as to what actually will happen.
 
I kill that SVChost and it brings down the used processing power from around 55% to about 5% but the used memory is still pegged at around 1.35GB??

I can't figure out why the used memory is so high? Just moving the mouse across the screen it slightly jumps around and there is a delay.
 
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