Host Process for Windows Services Stopped

Have you ever wanted to throw the computer out the window? It starts running slower, then your searches get redirected, you can't download windows updates. This is what happened to my son. He asked me how much desktop computers are these days. Knowing he had a perfectly good laptop, I inquired why he was entertaining the idea of purchasing something else.

When he told me the symptoms, I suggested he run a program called Malwarebytes from the website www.malwarebytes.org and gave him caution to make certain it is the program he is downloading and not an ad. Realizing he didn't already have this on his laptop, I had a flash drive that had it on, so I connected the flash drive to his computer and opened Malwarebytes to run the "quick scan" on his laptop. It found 33 threats. After removing those 33, I opened Malwarebytes again and clicked on the tab to "update" the version so that he could scan for the more recent threats. This gave us 17 more to remove. The quick scan takes about 10 minutes, the full scan can take a little over an hour. Since we were headed for church services, I ran the full scan just to see if any further threats appear. When we got back home, the computer showed 0 threats.

I checked to see if I was able to download updates for Windows 8 from the microsoft website, but I kept getting the error "host process for windows services stopped.....blah, blah, blah"....... so I knew that either there were more problems to remove or some files were corrupted. It turned out there were more problems to remove.

I found another tool called Hitman 3.5 on this website http://www.surfright.nl/en/hitmanpro that also scans for threats. This website allows me to run this program for 30 days without an activation code (free). There is a 32 bit or 64 bit version to download; I right clicked on "My Computer" and found under "Properties" which one to use for the laptop. I must caution the reader that there are at least THREE "download" buttons but only ONE GREEN ONE that says DOWNLOAD HERE. The red ones are ads for something else you don't want. Hitman found a type of an alureon virus to remove.

After that, the laptop ran much faster, the error codes were all gone, and windows was able to update normally. My son is buying my dinner for this fix. Win Win. ☺