Services.exe
 

From time to time my system slows down to a crawl for a few minutes. I Atl+Ctrl+Del to see Taskmanager > Processes and I see that services.exe is taking 98%-100% of my cpu and about 17-18megs of ram.

This is a Win2k machine running on a AMD XP2500 with 256mbDDR ram.

I've thought about adding more ram, I use this machine at work and I have at least 3-5 apps running at a time.

services.exe
It on my machine currently is using about 1.6MB RAM and has 7.8MB RAM allocated to it but not in use, 0% CPU. It shouldn't really be having that effect.

I'd say to run the usual spyware/virus check, make sure your system is clean.

This site might be good for future reference. http://www.answersthatwork.com/Taskl...s/tasklist.htm

Just put in anything that is showing up in your task list, and it will give you a description of what it is and whether or not you need it there. I then use startup cop to limit all of the crap that manages to work its way into the list.

The services programis the "manager" for other services running on your system. If you need to see what services are running:

1. RIght click My Computer
2. Click on Manager
3. On the MMC, click on Services and Applications
4. click on Services

Anything that's got "Started" on the line with it means it's running. Anything that has "automatic" but not "started" means it supposed to be running, but isn't.

As a side thought, check your system and application event log. Maybe a service is supposed to be running, but can't start for some reason.

I run Spybot on my machines and they're very clean. Looking at processes I don't see anything that's not suppose to be there.

My guess: with only 256mb of ram I may be low on mem and it's alocating to the swap file tying up my resourses in the meantime.

Make sense?