Microsoft has finally fixed the SVCHOST bug that has troubled Windows XP users for years. In the latest Patch Tuesday update, alongside several other improvements, Microsoft bundled a patch that addressed the infamous bug.
The SVCHOST bug is a rare issue that is only found in some Windows XP systems. This bug causes the CPU usage of the process “svchost.exe” to go as high as 100 percent. While there are a few online fixes available, none of them seems to work that well and of course none of them were official.
In last few years, Microsoft made several attempts to resolve this unusual issue, but could never locate where the bottleneck was. However, after the January 2014 Patch Tuesday update, which brought several improvements to Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8, the infamous SVCHOST bug has finally been resolved. Confirming to WindowsITPro, Dustin Childs, the group manager of Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, stated that this issue was resolved by depreciating legacy security updates for Internet Explorer.
“On Tuesday, Microsoft depreciated legacy security updates for Internet Explorer that had been replaced by more recent ones. We did this to improve customer experience, reducing the time Windows Update requires to check existing updates before installing new ones. This action was purely to improve update performance and does not affect customer security,” Childs stated.
It is obviously nice to see the software giant fixing this issue as Windows XP has no more than three Patch Tuesday updates left, as it loses support this April. The software giant recently announced that it will continue providing anti-malware protection to the 13 year old operating system until July of 2015.
Further reading: Microsoft, Patch Tuesday
