A few minutes after booting up my laptop (Thinkpad X201), svchost.exe goes to town on my hard drive. I can't help but thinking that this takes at least a few minutes off the battery life, assuming I only boot once per charge. I rather it didn't do this.
It seems when it does this it is reading a variety of program files, and also working with the NTFS master file table.
I've tried setting Prefetcher to 2 and Superfetch to 0 in regedit, but this doesn't appear to have done anything regarding this issue.
I have 13 svchost.exe running right now on my Vista machine. You can find tons of into on the internet about it - but in general - it's a "middle man" app that is rquired by many other processes.
Well, it more or less just scrolls through all my programs. Everything from Acrobat to Silverlight to Office. That's why I suspected pre/superfetch. Also, it does all this with "background" priority.
I should note, it does this even though the programs have not been opened. I can simply turn my computer on and not touch it and a few minutes after windows loads it will start doing this.
Start, run [type in] cmd and hit enter. Now the command prompt will open.
Right click the blinking square dot and paste it is. Hit enter. when the prompt returns you may close and go into the root of C: and find svc.txt. Double click it and it will open in notepad,
Note for win 7
start, [type in]CMD. I reached up, r-clicked and selected Run as Administrator
typed in , tasklist /svc /fo and hit enter and got a list of all the task running.