My PC is getting slower starting up and sometimes hangs I am sure this is becasue of too many background programs running.
Problem is. How do you tell what each running program does when you look at the systems tray?
I wanna avoid reinstalling XP to clear the cr*p but my reboots dont go back far enough tohelp.
Right clicking on an icon in the tool tray will sometimes get you a
context menu that includes a Help or About selection that gives you a
clue what it represents. Usually not. Many processes don't create
tool tray icons, and many tool tray icons don't represent processes
monopolising your cpu.
Instead of looking at the tool tray icons (which may or may not show
you a process using cpu) try looking at everything overall. Get
Process Explorer (free) from <
http://www.sysinternals.com/>, that will
show you all the processes running, who wrote each process (and the
modules included in each), where the modules reside, how much cpu and
memory each takes up, and much more.
Also Startup Control Panel (free) from <
http://www.mlin.net/> will
show you exactly what processes are being automatically started, and
allow you to disable one without removing it permanently, so you can
easily see if something can be eliminated without breaking something
else.
Cheers,
Chuck
Paranoia comes from experience - and is not necessarily a bad thing.
