# High CPU Usage spikes (0 to 30%) for an svchost process



## blahblahblahh (Aug 1, 2009)

Hi everyone, I'm having quite a hard time solving a problem that I have been having with an svchost process in Windows Vista (I've got service pack 2). 

The main reason that I noticed this spike in cpu usage was because while playing games on the computer, I would get massive fps drops every 10-15 seconds. These fps drops seemed to occur whenever the specific svchost process spiked from 0% cpu usage to 30%. After monitoring the process for a little while using process explorer I was able to find out some info about it.

Here's a pic of the CPU usage in process explorer:










Also, using the graph feature you can see how it spikes up and down every few seconds:










The svchost in question has the services "DCOM Server Process Launcher" and "Plug and Play" under it. The following is what is shown when highlighting the svchost process and also the command line shown for each of them in the services tab:



















After researching for solutions online, it seems as though there are quite a lot of other people experiencing this problem. One solution that some people talked about online was to go into the sound options, right click your specific device and go to properties. From there go into enhancements tab and check "disable all enhancements". Supposedly this would cause the dcom service from constantly checking hardware every few seconds, but doing this did not fix my problem and the process keeps spiking to 30% every few seconds no matter what programs are running or whether my system is simply idling.

I'm fairly certain that these CPU spikes are the cause of the performance issues when playing games or just browsing, because when I killed the DCOM process it stated that I now had to restart my computer but before it automatically restarted I was able to play the game without the spikes anymore, so DCOM or Plug and Play seem to be the main culprit.

Does anyone have any idea on how to get rid of these constant CPU spikes for dcom or plug and play? It is causing a pretty significant hit to my computer's performance and none of the solutions presented online seem to really solve the issue, since the spike to 30% is always there even after reboots etc. 

If you have any other questions or things you want me to add to help you solve this please post them, and thank you for any help you can give me.


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## usasma (Apr 11, 2009)

Right click on the svchost.exe process and select the Threads tab. See if there's an entry with high Cycles Delta and let us know the Start Address

Then, in the Process Explorer main window there should be a couple of entries that are "children" to it (on my system it's unsecapp.exe and WmiPrvSE.exe). Right click on them and check their Threads tabs for the same info.


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## blahblahblahh (Aug 1, 2009)

Actually I was working on this last night for a few hours and finally solved the problem. The program running under svchost was WmiPrvSE.exe, but I wasn't really able to lock down what program was calling WmiPrvSE. After a while I discovered that, by pretty much shutting services down, the problem was with the service HPSLPSVC or "HP Network Devices Support". After stopping this service, the cpu usage flatlined and the svchost started with a commandline option of dcom no longer spiked up and down. 

So after this I changed the startup for this service to Manual from Automatic and hopefully that fixes the problem of it beginning at startup and I'm also going to update drivers etc for HP to see if that totally fixes the problem. But overall I think this thread can be closed since I found what was causing it. Thank you for your help.


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## Flareman (Dec 27, 2009)

Hi there, I am having the same cpu spike problem as you, and its showing dcom launch as the main culprit. May I ask how did you eventually figure out which .exe file is causing the spike?


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