What does VzCdbSvc.exe actually do?

[jumbles1971]

On Thursday I got my brand new AR21S (a replacement for a previous one with dodgy hard drives) and this evening I got round to installing Half-Life 2. It's been about a month since I'd played it so I eagerly loaded it up and set all the graphics options to max. I watched the menu screen - the one in the City17 square with the view screen on the pillar - for a while and noticed that every few seconds it was 'missing a beat'. I opened Task Manager and had a look at the performance page. Both my CPUs were running at 60% minimum but rising to 70/80% every couple of seconds. There weren't any programs listed so I had a look on the Processes tab. There was a process - VzCdbSvc.exe - that was going up and down the list. I disabled it and my CPU usage plummeted to a much more friendly 10% and now in HL2 that Civil Protection dude strolls around the square "happy as a puppy with two pissers"!

I've looked the process up and it's VAIO Entertainment Database Service. What does that mean and is it actually doing anything useful? "Is it safe" to leave it disabled? On my old AR21S the CPU used to go up and down a lot but it never interfered with HL2.

Incidentally, HL2 looks absolutely stunning at 1920*1200 on an X-Black screen with all the graphics options turned up full!

thanks
Jumbles

[Thalamus.]

Hi Jumbles,

vzcdbsvc.exe is a process belonging to the Sony VAIO Entertainment studio. On my Vaio it's located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Sony Shared\VAIO Entertainment Platform\VzCdb

I've checked around and found that some malware can camouflage themselves as VzCdbSvc.exe, the malware are usually located in c:\windows or c:\windows\system32 folder.

[jumbles1971]

Mine was in the \Common Files\Sony Shared\... folder and I scanned it just to be on the safe side.

I've permanently disabled it so I don't have to turn it off every time I play HL2 but I don't want to miss out on something groovy that my computer was doing. You don't know what it actually does do you?

[rich912]

Hi Jumbles,

VzCdbSvc.exe monitors and indexes all of the multimedia files on your system. It can take some time to complete the initial task but should then settle down.

[jumbles1971]

I've never actually used any of the Sony Entertainment programs so I'm probably not missing anything but I might turn it back on in a bit just in case I change my mind... but not until I've played all the HL series.

Would changing its priority help? Before I disabled it, its priority was set to Normal?

[rich912]

To date I haven’t used any of the Sony Entertainment programs on my AR either but have just checked Task Manager – VzCdbSvc is running as a service but not as a process.

Maybe someone else with an AR could check the status of VzCdbSvc on their system.

Decreasing the priority may help but, given that you are not using any Sony Entertainment programs I am puzzled as to why it is showing up as a process

[Thalamus.]

Hi Rich

On my XP system VzCdbSvc.exe is running as a process 00 cpu usage and 13,396 k Mem usage..

On my Vista system it's the same as you Rich..

Are you running Vista or XP on your AR21S Jumbles..?

[rich912]

Thanks for the info Thalamus. As Jumbles said that it is a brand new AR21S I assume that it is running Vista

[jumbles1971]

I was going to go for an AR31S for the extra 40GB of storage but it came with Vista so I went for another AR21S even though it's now been discontinued.

I figured out what was wrong and now VzCdbSvc.exe is running at 0% CPU and 13,524KB Mem Usage.

To cut a long story short, the external HD I used to backup all my data has gone doolally and there is a problem with the Partition Table (or something). As I still have a load of data to recover off it I left it plugged in and VzCdbSvc.exe must have been repeatedly trying to scan it and failing and it didn't have the sense to stop trying.

Thanks for trying to help me and sorry for being so stupid.

Jumbles

ps. I'm now obsessed with watching my CPU usage and wondering what's stealing my cycles!

[rich912]

Good to hear that you have the problem sorted Jumbles