If you have a computer running the Windows operating system, you may have noticed the svchost.exe process running multiple times on your computer. You may also have noticed times when svchost.exe is taking up 100% of your CPU. This became extremely common with Windows XP, but continued in newer operating systems all the up to the latest version of Windows. So what is svchost.exe? Will svchost.exe harm your computer? Find out answers to these questions in the video below.
For some context, Windows has a number of system level processes that work in the background to make your computer function correctly. SVChost.exe is a shared-service process, which means it acts as a shell for loading other processes, typically from dynamic link library (DLL) files. Windows organizes these services into related host groups and runs the groups inside an individual instance of svchost.exe, which is why you will see it running more than once. The big advantage of this approach is that one group of services can’t cause all other services to fail in the event of a problem.
