PSRumbagh said:
Looking at "Windows Task Manager" in Windows XP Home, with no
applications running, reveals between 65 and 74 Processes running (in
the background?).
That's a little on the high side, but it's not necessarily an enormous
number. I think you should be concerned, not with how many are there, but
*which* (see below).
Their total memory usage is about 220MB. Some of
the processes I recognize but most I don't. No wonder startup takes
so long.
Are all of these really needed? If not, which ones can be
shut down or disabled upon startup?
Since you haven't told us their names, it's very difficult for anyone to
answer that question.
Which processes are absolutely
needed as a minimum?
I think that's very much the wrong question. The question should be "which
of these do something that I find valuable and am willing to devote some cpu
cycles to?"
You say "No wonder startup takes so long." How long does it take? Here's my
standard post on slow startup:
My personal view is that the attention many people pay to how long it takes
to boot is unwarranted. Assuming that the computer's speed is otherwise
satisfactory, it may not be worth worrying about. Most people start their
computers once a day or even less frequently. In the overall scheme of
things, even a few minutes to start up isn't very important. Personally I
power on my computer when I get up in the morning, then go get my coffee.
When I come back, it's done booting. I don't know how long it took to boot
and I don't care.
However if you do want to address it, it may be because of what programs
start automatically, and you may want to stop some of them from starting
that way. On each program you don't want to start automatically, check its
Options to see if it has the choice not to start (make sure you actually
choose the option not to run it, not just a "don't show icon" option). Many
can easily and best be stopped that way. If that doesn't work, run MSCONFIG
from the Start | Run line, and on the Startup tab, uncheck the programs you
don't want to start automatically.
However, if I were you, I wouldn't do this just for the purpose of running
the minimum number of programs. Despite what many people tell you, you
should be concerned, not with how *many* of these programs you run, but
*which*. Some of them can hurt performance severely, but others have no
effect on performance.
Don't just stop programs from running willy-nilly. What you should do is
determine what each program is, what its value is to you, and what the cost
in performance is of its running all the time. You can get more information
about these at
http://castlecops.com/StartupList.html. If you can't find it
there, try google searches and ask about specifics here.
Once you have that information, you can make an intelligent informed
decision about what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of.
