Nah, Windows tends to send that “…and needed to close” message on everything - even its own services. You’re in no trouble but - don’t get me wrong - I like Mac OS X more. I’ve been with Windows for a full 7 years, and apparently, 7’s not a good number for me! ;-). An old boring blog post I made once (what? Nobody commented! ‘^_^) justified why I now hate Microsoft. I’ll get my iMac in a few months, and until then, i’m saving one last genuine installation on my CD just for the PC-only games. That’s the only issue when moving from a PC to a Mac!.

P.S.: I tend to go off-topic — alot and much ;-). Now clicking about 1,000 ads! :-}.

If this is the first time you’ve seen these sort of messages you’re lucky - I get them all the time - but then I’m always downloading new stuff to try out. Have you recently installed any new software?

If it doesn’t happen again then forget about it. If it keeps happening then use system restore to go back to an earlier point in time.

No need to restore!. The “Generic Host Services” thingy does rarely anything. It’s the one filling the “Processes” tab with “svchost.exe”. My 3.4Ghz computer can prove it for not doing anything ;-).

P.S.: You should get another Windows theme. I got me a Windows Vista one! ;-).

Could also be that it closed a duplicate viral process running under the svchost name, rundll32 as well. Many worms duplicate this process as it’s harder to figure out which is the virus and which is the real process.

Actually, smiley, a bigger issue moving to mac if you want to run games is that you can’t run new video cards. I have two mac pros, and I’m still running all my games and high end graphics apps under windows environments (save maya, and avid liquid which run under solaris 10). The most I can put into them is a radeon x1900, and that just doesn’t cut it. Also, with the advent of leopard (and code bloat) I’ve seen massive slowdowns from 10.4.

I like working in OS X, and it’s pretty, but I’m really a bit miffed at having what is ostensibly 10k USD of email checking terminals (not including the xserve). With the recent issues, I’ve been spending more and more time on vista, which runs oustandingly if you have good system to put it on and disable aero.

I am planning on playing games on a Windows environment, which will be OK since my only current game is The Sims 2 ;-). That doesn’t take too much graphics, even less than Second Life! Really.

(Something i’m sure you didn’t know of: Second Life takes 3 times the amount of processing power “World of Warcraft” uses. That’s due to prims, since each is a tiny 3D mesh, the graphics card is bombarded with about 5,000+ meshes to render. Plus your avie is a very complex one. So if it can run Second Life, it can run The Sims 2 ;-). )

Well Vint if you are going to live in the Mickey$oft world, learn to deal with it’s quirks…. If you want a stable OS that actually tells you what’s wrong when a problem arises get something else if not use the standard windblows solution … reboot.

“In a world without walls and fences, who needs windows and gates?”

I’m quite aware. World of Warcraft is also written for efficiency so it can run on a broad array of systems. Low polycount avatars, simple backdrops and models, etc. I’m glad they at least took the time to make it both opengl and direct x, though, originally being a mac based company, I was sort of expecting it. Not a great example of a high end game. In second life, there is also the avatar composition limit to take into account, you can change it here and consume as much resources as you like. I would stack SL up moreso against oblivion or vanguard.

I will not run second life on my macs, because I can’t control the level of antialiaing on the card itself (thanks to no third party drivers). Running it is one thing, running it well is quite another.

Well, it’s been a while since I used Windows, but if you did not have it before, killing a program which tries to execute the data should be a good thing. Usually it is the *code* that is supposed to be executed, not data. (indeed, there are various special cases, but they should be handled transparently).

Think of what foreign software you were installing, which websites did you browse other than usual, and try to correlate to think whether you might have got the virus or not… suddenly trying to execute the data is not fantastic.

Hi, Vint.

The short answer is: no, you’re not in any trouble and you didn’t do anything wrong. Although it’s rather confusing, Windows was actually taking preventative steps that are designed to help make your computer more secure.

First, a little background. The “Generic Host Process for Win32 Services” is a component of Windows that will appear as “svchost.exe” in the Task Manager. There are many specialized programs, called “services” which run in Windows all the time. These services take care of things like helping to manage your network connection, to downloading Windows Update patches, to keeping your computer’s clock set properly. (You can see a list of all the services that are running on your computer by right-clicking on “My Computer”, selecting “Manage”, opening the “Services and Applications” entry, and selecting “Services”.) The “svchost.exe” application manages several of these services at the same time, and it’s not unusual to have more than one copy of “svchost.exe” running at any given time, each of them managing a different set of services.

The first error message you saw, the “Data Execution Prevention” (or “DEP”) message, appeared because one of the services that “svchost.exe” crashed in a particular manner. In general, the memory that computer programs use can be one of two types: executable memory, which stores the actual computer instructions that make up the program, and data memory, which stores the information that the program is using. The kind of information stored in data memory is in a different format than executable memory, and the two types of memory don’t mix. Usually this isn’t a problem, but if a program has a bug in it, or if a malicious attacker is trying to break into a system, sometimes a program will try to interpret data memory as exeuctable memory. When this happens, Windows will cause the program to crash. This sounds severe, but making the program crash is actually better than letting it continue to run — since it’s trying to execute data memory, something has gone seriously awry, and allowing the program to keep running can result in data corruption or other such problems. Better to stop the program and crash it before it can do any more damage.

So, the first error message, the DEP message, was simply Windows telling you that the svchost.exe program became confused, and was trying to interpret data memory as executable memory, and so it was terminated by crashing the program.

The second error message, the “Please tell Microsoft about this problem” message, is the same kind of error message you’ll get when any Windows application crashes for any reason. You just happened to get two messages about the same program because of the particular way in which svchost.exe crashed, a DEP crash, triggers an additional message before the standard “hey this program has crashed” message.

There are lots of reasons programs crash, and most of them are simply because all programs have bugs in them. It’s a little more confusing in this case because the program that crashed (svchost.exe) is part of Windows and made my Microsoft, and Windows reported the DEP error, and it also reported the crash report, and everything is made by Microsoft so why are you getting all these messages? The answer is simply that just because Microsoft made it and it’s part of Windows doesn’t mean it doesn’t crash. :) I’m not trying to be cute, of course. Whether a program that crashes is made by Microsoft or not, Windows treats all crashes equally. This is actually a good thing — it means that (as long as you send the crash reports), Microsoft learns which of its programs crash, too. It would be much worse if Windows only reported on non-Microsoft programs that crashed!

And in my opinion, it’s always a good idea to submit the crash reports to Microsoft. Every report they get helps them figure out which parts of Windows (or Office, or whatever) have bugs in them, and hopefully those bugs will eventually get fixed.

winter is comming Vint… windows must be closed by now.. to keep the warmth in.. Kyoto agreement asks a little efford from all of us, you know.. :-p

oops.. *effort*..

Vint, you lucky thing. I simply shut down one of those services, and it gave me a “military-like” 60-second deadline to restart! I feel like an 8 year old being commanded by his mother to change to jammies and get into bed in 60 seconds >.> .