Svchost and TrustedInstaller High Memory Usage

[at1105]

Im working on a Dell Vostro desktop and a Compaq CQ57 laptop that are having similar problems. Both are running Windows 7 and were running slow.

After no increase in performance after virus/malware removal and system tweaking, I did a complete factory restore on the Compaq. All went well and now I'm using the Windows update to get it up to date but it is painfully slow. It's been working on the first round of updates since yesterday. Says it's running low on memory. CPU usage is <10% but memory usage is 95-97%. Showing that the main process using the memory is TrustedInstaller.

The Dell was taking about 30 minutes to boot. Virus/malware removal and system tweaking did a good job of bringing it back to life. However, it was back to a crawl within minutes of restarting it. Again, <10% CPU usage and 95-97% memory usage by Svchost which is running Windows Update and a slew of other services.

Is there anyway to throttle the Svchost process back a little or maybe there's an underlying factor I'm missing here? just found it strange that both systems were having the same issues related to Windows Update. I've seen some bog down but usually they bounce right back within a few minutes. These have been struggling since yesterday.

 

[coffee]

No but you might look into adding more memory.

 

[gadgetfixup]

I'd start dumping the factory bloatware before updates. A lot of these old factory restores were filled with bloatware. I suspect Windows services are trying to run these outdated or broken apps. If you want to narrow it down you can check the Windows logs for errors. Clean up autoruns to kill unnecessary apps at startup. All the basic stuff really.

 

[glennd]

Agreed. The cpu is not doing much because the page file is thrashing. Need to add ram and reduce the crapware. What I've taken to doing is when I'm working on low ram machines, I'll just add whatever ram i have in the bucket to get it up to 4GB or more, finish whatever jobs need to be done on it, then take my ram out again. And suggest to the customer a ram upgrade will make things much nicer.

 

[mm201]

I had a problem with the Trusted Installer on my personal machine. I don't recall what the resolution was, but once I started researching the problem I found out it's a fairly common issue.

 

[gadgetfixup]

Typically high load trustedinstaller process is failed or stuck MS updates if the hardware checks out. Go dump the pending updates and see if that fixes it for you.

 

[FremontPC]

Check the hard drives with Crystal Disk Info to see if they might be on the way out and causing the system to thrash. Also, if Intel Rapid Storage is installed, remove it if the system isn't using RAID.