Vista: High number of processes

Hi guys, I'm not sure if this is perhaps the best place to post this on here but I'm looking for help to cut down the high number of processes that I have on my version of Vista which stands at around 65 when I feel a more suitable level would range from 20 to 40.

The laptop itself if new and apart from much of the bloatware (which I've almost cleared anyway) very little is installed on it.

On my desktop the number of processors is about half my laptops which is why I am concerned.

Shown below are the processes. Any help getting rid of all but the essential ones would be very helpful




Cheers

 

Mine is running with 62. If they do not impact your system performance, and you are ok with the processes, leave them.

cheers ...

 

59 processes running on my e1705 under Windows 7. Reducing the number of processes is unnecessary IMHO, unless your system is crawling along.

 

Ah ok. I was getting worried that this was a high level and they'd be detrimental in some way.

Panic over.

 

i have 38 processes running on my gateway windows vista home edition 64bit

 

I have just over 70 on my Dell E4300. Though I have iTunes, Norton Internet Security 2009, Google Chrome, and Dell Control Point (which adds a few) all installed.

My system is fast and feels very unencumbered despite the processes running.

With Chrome open with 3 tabs, I'm at 78.

 

I have 75 processes, and my laptop's very snappy. It's not really about how many processes, but how much resources these processes are using, and whether they are detrimetally impacting your computer's performance.

 

I have 30...

To the OP, go to msconfig and disable some start up apps that you don't want running. If you want to go in deeper, run services.msc and disable the unnecessary items. www.blackviper.com can help you.

 

I have 101 processes running on my laptop right now. CPU load at idle is around 1% on average. As has been said before, unless you find a process unduly burdening your system, there is no reason at all to bother trimming the number of processes. Vista is perfectly capable of managing its processes on its own.

Quite frankly, in my experience, fiddling with services to gain performance is generally a glorious waste of time. Any benefits gained from such endeavors usually exist in the imagination of the "tweaker" only, and there is a danger of losing some useful functionality if you don't know what you're doing. Of course, if you're bored and have nothing else to do with your time or your computer, feel free to tweak to your heart's content, otherwise I'd suggest to leave well enough alone.

My two cents...

 

First, how much RAM do you have onboard? Second, you could disable the Microsoft search service (unless you use it), without negatively impacting anything other than your ability to search for a particular file. That should cut out 3 processes. Third, figure out what that process called "Acer Empowering Technology Framework" - it may be a necessary part of the proprietary drivers or other system software, but then again, it might be something surplus.

Beyond that, you might figure out if there's a conflict between your AVG A/V software and something else, such as the built-in firewall - that could cause some system slowdown if such a conflict existed.

Also, try running with fewer Firefox tabs opened up. Your list shows FF using about 122MB of memory (most likely a combination of RAM and paged memory), I've got three separate IE8 windows running and combined they're using about 35MB of memory for comparison.

Also, have you disabled your paging file?

All that being said, the number of processes running has very little bearing on how the system performs. As we speak, I have 79 processes running on my system (in my sig) and it's fast as all get-out. What matters more is, as another poster said, the amount of resources allocated to each process, and how efficiently that process uses those resources. One way to determine which processes are taking a large amount of time is to add the column in task manager that shows page faults - how often that process had to have stuff paged in from disk - the greater the number of page faults, the more time-consuming the process.

Finally, if you really want to drill down on the processes that are running, understand what each is doing, and whether or not you can afford to disable it, use something like Sysinternals' Process Explorer, not the built-in task manager, which is a rather dull, blunt instrument for doing what really constitutes delicate surgery.

 

Mine has 44 processes. About 4 of those are specific to tabletpc's. One more is because I use Groove. Another is for the pdf printer driver.

 

Vista will naturally have more processes than XP does in the beginning because it has a bunch more functionality. It's not a bad thing to have 50+ processes at startup, as most if not all of those processes are for allowing Vista to provide lots of features. In my view, Vista is much better at utilizing system resources (after SP1 of course ). The only concern is that those processes don't chew up too many CPU cycles. As long as a system has at least 2 GB or more of RAM, then Vista will do fine.

 

It's going to have 50 as a reasonable number, I think. Vista just has more than XP with the same stuff installed, period.

Cheers...

 

I haven't noticed any negative effects due to the high number of processes, though on average there are more processes in Vista than on any XP machine I've seen.

 

You have a fair number of processes that are, shall we say, running at the user's discretion. Other than that observation, your process list does not seem excessive. I have trimmed mine somewhat and find that 50 is "normal" for my machine.