PROBLEM: In the Windows 8 Task Manager, svchost.exe is being shown as using around 135MB of RAM memory itself, which seems highly excessive to me. No other system file uses anything like that much memory. A huge 12GB of memory is installed in a Windows 8 64-bit system and it is causing 90% or more of it to be used, which is completely out of order. I have to restart the computer in order to get back to normal, but the problem returns as soon as I go online. Do you have any idea what’s going on here and how it can be put right?
ANSWER: After a fairly long investigation, the cause of this turned out to be the V9 Portal Site and en.v9.com, which hijacks the browser, in this case Google’s Chrome, but it could have been any other rogue software of the same kind. It is installed with free software and changes the default home page to en.v9.com and default search engine to search.v9.com. This is not unusual. The web user probably didn’t disable an option that makes the changes while installing the software.
You should always take care when installing free software because most of it is installs something you don’t want unless you choose to disable the option to do so. Even the Adobe Flash Player update provides an enabled setting that installs Google’s Chrome browser or McAfee security software unless the user disables it. This particular rogue software is malware because it goes further by changing random Windows shortcuts on your desktop and your Windows Start Menu so that they show ads and sponsored links in search results and may collect the user’s web-search queries.
Here is a website that provides instructions on how to remove the infection should the solution provided below not be available due to the fact that System Restore was disabled, doesn’t work or hasn’t got a restore point that predates the infection:
Remove V9 Portal, browser hijacker –
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/protect/forum/…
There is an easier way that works most of the time. If you suddenly find yourself having a problem like this one, which is a common occurrence due to the fact that so much free software can install rogue or unwanted software if the user fails to notice an enabled option that allows this to happen, restoring a System Restore restore point that predated it will make Windows restore itself to the state it was in on that date, removing any software that was installed after that date, thereby fixing the problem. The restore point has to predate the infection because restore points can restore infections if they were created while the infection was installed.
There is plenty of information on how to use System Restore on the web for the version of Windows that you are using.
