Process "Management"?

After an earlier thread here involving my XP machine, I have now taken a peek into my Vista machine, and found the below craziness (*attached*).

Granted, the Vista machine has 3GB of RAM as opposed to the 2GB in the XP machine, but isn't this 300+K ("Peak") of usage excessive please??

Thanks in advance...
PS ~ I downloaded "Process Manager 1.6.192" but have absolutely NO clue whatsoever what to do with it (I don't understand what it does...how it possibly works...I don't get it [?]...at all).

 

From what I can find on the Microsoft site, svchost.exe basically runs multiple services at the same time, therefore a peak of 300k+ could just be that there were a lot of processes run by svchost.exe at startup: (quoted text applies to XP, but the result is the same as seen in the other links below for Vista)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314056
http://social.answers.microsoft.com.../thread/e2dedda5-b2b5-4e91-803c-e29a75b0a264/
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/What-is-svchost-exe

 

if you use a tool like process explorer, and view the running processes, it will show you what services/processes initiated svchost.exe, along with others.
http://majorgeeks.com/Process_Explorer_d4566.html

 

Does seem high but I'd be less concerned about my peak instead of the current, and that doesn't look high.

At idle, however, no windows open, no scans running, nothing, what do you see in CPU %usage? Should be at or near zero.

 

Ok, thank you to everyone here. I went ahead, and downloaded Process Explorer, however, without much study (it seems to me), that I read (understand) even less here than I did in Task Manager (??).

Is the item (attached) marked in BLOOD Red, a problem please?

And what is it, Media Player?

Thanks again and in advance...

 

Windows Management Instrumentation is a set of windows APIs that allow software to monitor hardware states and other things. It uses a common host to execute these APIs so if one service crashes it doesn't bring down the entire WMI infrastructure. It's a normal part of windows and something you don't need to worry about.

 

Then simply don't waste your time on it. Unless you work out how to use it by reading its help files, it wont get you anywhere.
Basically, PE is a tool for troubleshooting actual problems. It wont solve any basic query you have about RAM usage.
But there is a simple principle you can apply (especially as you have 2gb of RAM on XP and 3GB on Vista) - forget about how much RAM your programs use *unless* the usage actually creates a *problem* on your system.
Idle browsing of ram stats is actually a total waste of time and just leads peeps to often say 'oooh isn't that a lot of ram being used???' which is a bit pointless unless the system is short of ram.

 

Thank you Noone ("Someone"! ) and thank you Brijack!