Programs in System Tray

  • Thread starter Thread starter Rob
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R

Rob

Hi,

Wonder if someone could give some advice on something that's confusing me.
Back in the days of slow processors (600mhz AMD Athlon's etc.) and pre XP
O/S, everyone, including I, was concerned with too many programs loading at
start-up and running in the background consuming CPU time and memory, and
generally slowing things down to a crawl.
Well with the likes of the new XP O/S and today's lighting fast PC's with
huge amounts of memory do we still have to worry about this? I would like to
run quite a few apps in the background like Norton's Liveupdate, Windows
Update plus several others, but am stuck in 1998 worrying if my new P4
800FSB, 1GB DDR PC will start acting like my old 600MHz AMD 192mb PC100.
What do you all do on yours, do you all run as many background apps as
possible or do we still have to keep things to the bare minimum? Any advice
appreciated.

Rob
 
Hi there,

I still go by the old rules. My startup list is limited
to the very basics of Norton Internet Security and
Activecaptions, a little organizational tool that I use a
lot. Everything else doesn't open until I tell it to.
When I boot up my desktop computer, I see 3 icons:

-the sound control speaker
-the globe of NIS
-the screens of my LAN connection

With my laptop I see the same as above, but I also see
the power settings icon as well.

Sure, the new comp you spec'ed will run faster and
smoother than your Athlon, but disabling programs that
you don't use on a daily basis will help everything run
smoother on average. When loading most programs, the RAM
is the key factor in how long it takes to start up. With
anything over 512MB, you should be just fine. But just
remember, the more programs you have open, the more of
that memory is used up and is unavailable for any other
programs that you use. Another thing to consider, with
faster computers, it only takes a second to two to open
up the typical everyday applications, so you won't really
notice any difference if you have the program pre-loaded
in your system tray or you open it up manually.

Oh, and if you want to do any gaming, multimedia (video,
image, audio) editing, or CAD modelling, then the answer
is a very simple "Disable everything except for your
Firewall"

Just my two cents.

Nick
nkjg/at\interchange/dot\ubc/dot\ca
 
Rob said:
Hi,

Wonder if someone could give some advice on something that's confusing me.
Back in the days of slow processors (600mhz AMD Athlon's etc.) and pre XP
O/S, everyone, including I, was concerned with too many programs loading at
start-up and running in the background consuming CPU time and memory, and
generally slowing things down to a crawl.
Well with the likes of the new XP O/S and today's lighting fast PC's with
huge amounts of memory do we still have to worry about this? I would like to
run quite a few apps in the background like Norton's Liveupdate, Windows
Update plus several others, but am stuck in 1998 worrying if my new P4
800FSB, 1GB DDR PC will start acting like my old 600MHz AMD 192mb PC100.
What do you all do on yours, do you all run as many background apps as
possible or do we still have to keep things to the bare minimum? Any advice
appreciated.

Rob
Click to expand...

It's sort of a trade off. The programs that run today use more resources
than those that were around in the 600Mhz. days. If you have a 3GHZ.
computer with a gig of RAM you won't see as much of a hit but if you load up
on background processes you'll still see a slow down.

I still keep it to a bare minimum including stopping any XP services I don't
require for functionality.

--
D

I'm not an MVP a VIP nor do I have ESP.
I was just trying to help.
Please use your own best judgment before implementing any suggestions or
advice herein.
No warranty is expressed or implied.
Your mileage may vary.
See store for details. :)

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