SVCHOST.EXE at 100% cpu

[Little Marine]

I bought a Toshiba C655 laptop at a pawnshop for my nephew to use at home for school. It has W7 with an Intel Celeron processor with 2GB of ram. The computer is really slow. I looked at the task manager. It shows svchost.exe at 99% cpu usage. I right clicked to show the services running. I researched what was running but I don't see anything unusual. I can stop the process with no ill effects to what I am doing. Is this computer just outdated for todays use?

[soybean]

Well, based on what I can find on the internet, it was a low performer right from its introduction in the market.  http://support.toshiba.com/support/staticContentDetail?contentId=2687252&isFromTOCLink=false indicates it can support up to 4GB of RAM, if that is the model you have.   I'd visit www.crucial.com and see what the cost of increasing the RAM to 4GB would be.  You need to know the exact model; it is not simply C655; you should see some characters following C655; they tell the exact model you have.

[SuperDave]

I have the same problem with my Toshiba. As soon as it boots up I go into the Device Manager and end the svchost task and it works very well.

[Little Marine]

I can give it back to the pawn shop for a better one. I will just add some more money to get a better one.

[Geek-9pm]

A check on eBay for Toshiba C655 laptop shows the price range is very wide. That is not good news. You may do better with some other model.
(The wide variation in price may mean that they are hard to resell and many users just want to dump them.) 

[Little Marine]

I took it back to the pawn and upgraded to an HP with an I5 processor. Works great

[Edbytes]

it seems to me that you forgot to see how fragmented the hard drive was? did you try to do a benchmark on all the components and see what was causing the issue? as a good rule of thumb before looking at the software you must first look at the hardware meaning start at layer one which is the physical layer than move up from there and you will find your culprit. my two cents.

[patio]

He solved his issue...

[Little Marine]

The only problem I have with the HP was it searched for updates for 24 hours and never found any. It kept searching. Also on the fragmenting issue. I thought Windows 7 automatically defragged itself.

[Little Marine]

I looked up the problem in Microsoft knowledge base. I will try their fix tomorrow.

[banjo67xxx]

I had a similar problem on a Windows 7 virtual machine. I did some investigation and found that Windows Update service was causing svchost.exe to use all the CPU, and it would never find an update.

I eventually found the solution here https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3102810

You can't find this update because Windows Update service is broken. You need to stop the service, manually download the fix and install it, then reboot.

After doing that, and checking for updates again, I found another 238 updates available (1GB).