Windows XP Processes.

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This is my first post on this forum, so go easy....

I have about 40 plus processes happening on my Wondows XP system. In your collective experience, would you say this is quite excessive? I must admit to using Norton, which I know is quite a resource hog.

Many thanks for any advice you can offer.

Paul
 
welcome to the forums

you'd be better off ditching norton as you've suggested :), if you're willing to pay for AV (it is worth it at the end of the day), then go for NOD32 or maybe Kaspersky antivirus

look in the 'startup' folder in the star menu and remove anything that you dont need from there..

-also, whats running in your taskbar? -bottom right, if you think something is not needed, then go thorugh the options for that program and try to remove the icon

just to give an idea, i've got 24 processes running right now (two are nod32), and i've got firefox, winamp and msn open
 
On a freshly booted Fedora box, without X started I have 70 processes running with 33 of them being kernel processes alone
 
on my custom built pc i have an anverage of 28 started 33 whilst ive got everything going eg firefox winamp msn office... but my laptop has an average of 35 on startup thats due to the fact that the scren needs a spcl display driver, mouse driver camera driver etc...but it did have 50 at the beggining my advice is to go to download.com and get win patrol itl say shareware (may say freeware) but it dosent have a time out the ayd version is just for extras not very impresive extras to pay for but none the less its a good program for free ...anyways itl sort out all your start-up progs and from there you can check which proseccors or not u need (WARNING dont stop svchost) you could use windows to stop them all but i find win patrol easier to use and it also tells me if any program is trying to change things such as file types or homepage etc......
 
bledd. said:
welcome to the forums

you'd be better off ditching norton as you've suggested :), if you're willing to pay for AV (it is worth it at the end of the day), then go for NOD32 or maybe Kaspersky antivirus

look in the 'startup' folder in the star menu and remove anything that you dont need from there..

-also, whats running in your taskbar? -bottom right, if you think something is not needed, then go thorugh the options for that program and try to remove the icon

just to give an idea, i've got 24 processes running right now (two are nod32), and i've got firefox, winamp and msn open

Thanks for the advice. My subscription to Norton ends in about 60 days, so I think I'll take your advice and try Kaspersky on a clean XP install. I think the time has come to go through the list with a fine tooth comb and see exactly what/what isn't needed... thanks again, Paul.
 
knowlesy said:
on my custom built pc i have an anverage of 28 started 33 whilst ive got everything going eg firefox winamp msn office... but my laptop has an average of 35 on startup thats due to the fact that the scren needs a spcl display driver, mouse driver camera driver etc...but it did have 50 at the beggining my advice is to go to download.com and get win patrol itl say shareware (may say freeware) but it dosent have a time out the ayd version is just for extras not very impresive extras to pay for but none the less its a good program for free ...anyways itl sort out all your start-up progs and from there you can check which proseccors or not u need (WARNING dont stop svchost) you could use windows to stop them all but i find win patrol easier to use and it also tells me if any program is trying to change things such as file types or homepage etc......

hi, i am sat 2 people away from you
 
bledd. said:
just to give an idea, i've got 24 processes running right now (two are nod32), and i've got firefox, winamp and msn open
24?! Crikey, I've got 38 here. I've deleted the jusched.exe from the RunOnce but I need to check out the Creative ones and see which ones I can get rid of for my X-Fi. I've also gone into Services and made the PerfectDisk and Print Spooler services manual so they should only run when I need them.
 
MarcLister said:
24?! Crikey, I've got 38 here. I've deleted the jusched.exe from the RunOnce but I need to check out the Creative ones and see which ones I can get rid of for my X-Fi. I've also gone into Services and made the PerfectDisk and Print Spooler services manual so they should only run when I need them.


anything else to make manual to cut down ????
 
My advice is to have a look at the start up tab in msconfig and remove those items you dont need starting i.e. adobe helper ect. i would also try and remove any services that you dont need to start i.e. terminal services. a good guide can be found :
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=1969734&postcount=3

the trick is to remove all those things that you dont need to run automaticall if at all.

This will all depend on what you want your computer to do. i usaly run between 25-33 processes depending on what i'm doing, that includes firewall & AV.
 
knowlesy said:
anything else to make manual to cut down ????
Er anything you don't really use. I have the IMAPI CD burning service on manual but I disable things like Help, Indexing, Fast User Switching, Remote Registry etc because I don't use them at all.

I think your best bet is to look at emo_hugs post above.
 
bledd. said:
what use is posting that in the windows forum! :p

It's just to indicate that eye of beholder thing. "A lot of processes" is relative.
 
Quietly sitting here with 16 proccesses running (plus IE and Task Manager). No need to run rubbish that your not using!
 
ns400r said:
Quietly sitting here with 16 proccesses running (plus IE and Task Manager). No need to run rubbish that your not using!

16?

thats rather low, nn_step's xs os does about 12 and looses loads of functionality so im holding that one in doubt...

I have 55 on my laptop (xps m1710)

i use it for php, mysql, internet, apache, fah, school work, games, everything possible basically so it has a lot of stuff on it.

its funny, the bluetooth and wirless drivers have about 19 processes running between them.

On my desktop i have a mere 35 though, thats used for general stuff, encoding, fah, games and media productions (a/v editing)

Imo, a good defragger and fast hard drives are a big influence in xp speed not the number of processes, although bloated software/processes that hog ram are going to slow a system down.

I would say that 55 processes make my laptop slow but thats only due to the massive speed diffrence from the hard drive in xps to my desktop drives.

(120gb 5.4k drive gets slaughtered by the quad hard drive array in raid 0 (64k))
 
If you dont like lots of processes then dont install F-Secure lol, am sat here looking at 52 processes :)

MAchine runs fine and as long as I know what they are I dont mind :)
 
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