How do I reduce the number of background programs....

Question

How do I reduce the number of background programs from loading on startup? It seems as if there a  WHOLE lot of prgrams activated during bootup that use up too much memorty and or make my system slow. I would like the option to either to setup it up so I can choose when to load all the programs versus choosing when to load only essential programs on startup. Thanks

Denny Denham · Answer

...Hark! Do I hear an echo?

msgale · Answer

My best suggestion is to do nothing.  Most of the process that are in the process table are accumulating little or no time.  I will bet that most of the CPU resources are used by the System Idle Process, therefore CPU resources are available.  If there is insufficient memory to run a higher priority process the an inactive one will be paged out.   The only time that there may be a valid reason the remove some processes is you are runniong Windows XP on a ancient PC, Pentium II 300 Mhz, 2nd 256 MBytes of RAM.

Denny Denham · Answer

@msgale wrote:

Denny - How much System Idle Time? Mine are System Idle Process 194:23:00 192:23:00, Rtvscan.exe 3:19:43 Not running, Beremote.exe 0:49;52 Not running and gcasServ.exe 0:17:49 1:08:27. Booted 8/27/2005 6:42 PM EDT Two CPUs no hyper threading, 55 processed.

Denny Denham · Answer

wmiles,

I suspect you are referring to running processes. I currently have 46 processes running on my system and in the 192 hours since I booted only two of them (gcasServ.exe with 1 hour 08 minutes use, and scvhost with 28 minutes use) have used more than 10 minutes of processor time and only ten other processes have use one minute of processor time. Reducing the number of processes that start when Windows starts is not wise unless you know exactly what you are doing and even at that doing so will have a limited effect on system performance.

A better solution to poor performance is adding RAM to at least the 512MB "sweet spot" of Windows XP.

msgale · Answer

Denny - How much System Idle Time?   Mine are System Idle Process 194:23:00, Rtvscan.exe 3:19:43, Beremote.exe 0:49;52 and gcasServ.exe 0:17:49.  Booted 8/27/2005 6:42 PM EDT Two CPUs no hyper threading, 55 processed.

wemiles · Answer

Is Task manager the program you are referring to regarding processor time? How do you determine CPU time?

It seems I read somewhere in XP you can shutdown background programs to free up processor work and speed up certain programs like the newer games who seem to slow the cpu and video card to a crawl. I have the inspiron 9100 with 128mb ati 9700. I also have a 1 GB of ram. Some of the graphic intensive programs will slow framerate to a crawl and I would like to remedy that. Thanks.

Denny Denham · Answer

wmiles,

Yes, we are using Task Manager. If you go to the Processes tab then go to View|Select Columns you can place a check mark by CPU time to add it to your display. If you have unnecessary applications starting at bootup you can prevent them from doing so by unchecking their entries on the startup tab of msconfig (go to Start|Run, enter msconfig and click OK). What each of them does can be found by searching the database here.

wemiles · Answer

I appreciate the help.  Have a good weekend and holiday.   wmiles

Windows General

How do I reduce the number of background programs....

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