Scanning for viruses and spyware
If you use a computer, chances are you know of the dangers of viruses and spyware. The effects of viruses and spyware vary. They can be fairly harmless, such as hacking into your Microsoft Outlook contacts and sending spam to those on your email lists. Other times, it can be much more serious, deleting files and crashing your hard drive.
Scanning for viruses and spyware
One way you can protect your computer from viruses and spyware is through anti-virus software. Computer viruses circulate often and can be picked up in the form of a seemingly-harmless email or through other means. Damage from viruses varies. They can cause little damage or completely erase your hard drive and everything on it. Anti-virus software recognizes these threats and protects your computer from being harmed. Many anti-virus software also includes protection against spyware, which tracks what sites you visit.
What is svchost and what should I do about it?
If you are puzzled about why there are nearly a dozen processes running with the name svchost.exe. and what you should do about them this article is for you. You may be surprised to see all of these processes running and even more frustrated when you realize you can't kill them, and you don't remember starting them. This leaves the question-What is svchost and what should I do about it? According to Microsoft the definition is: "svchost.exe is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries". In simpler terms-Microsoft started moving all of the functionality from internal Windows services into .dll files instead of .exe files. From only a programming perspective this makes more sense for reusability but the problem arose that you cannot launch a .dll file directly from Windows. The program has to be loaded up from a running executable (.exe). Thus the svchost.exe process was born.
But this still does not explain why there are so many svchost.exes running. But if you have ever taken a look at the Services section in the control panel you might notice that there are a lot of services required by Windows. If every single service that was needed ran under a single svchost.exe instance, a failure in one might bring down all of Windows. So because of this they are separated out. The services are organized into logical groups, and then a single svchost.exe instance is created for each group. For instance, one svchost.exe instance runs the 3 services that are related to the firewall and then another svchost.exe instance might run all the services related to the user interface etc.
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