You can hide (behind svchost.exe), but you can't run

I like coding on the plane, even when I am flying coach and do not have access to the "oh so convenient" power socket. In fact my 22 hour trips back to India from Seattle to visit my family and friends are some of the my most productive time coding up something nifty. (I hope my manager is reading ;-))

To reduce my trips to the restroom to charge my laptop by plugging in to the shaver socket, I try and remove all the running processes that I can safely do without. So I fire up Task Manager and make it show processes from all users.

Once, I noticed I have 82 processes with 15 svchosts.exe with significant private working set and CPU Time. I wanted to selectively get rid of the ones which are not hosting one of the crucial services for the consistency of my system.

I just discoverd that on Vista, I can right click on any process in the task manager and click on the [Go to Service(s)]

.

It takes me to the services tab on the Task Manager with all the services hosted by that process highlighted.

This is uber cool! Now I know what's behind svchost or any other process and allows me to selectively kill processes which I can survive without.