Improving performance, tidying out registry & hard drive

[Donkey497]

Hi Folks,

I largely use a 5 year old laptop for personal / occasional professional use, running on Wingows XP [2002 Media Centre Edition].
Basically I run Word, Excel, Powerpoint, IE8, Google Earth, (basic) photo manipulation software, skype and the usual Adobe & video players.

I'm no IT expert, but I do keep the operating system with Microsoft updates (now at service pack 3), so as it now seems to me that my laptop now takes a lot longer to boot up and also seems to have a hell of a lot of processes running in the background (71 last time I hit Control-Alt-Delete when running normally).:eek:

My question is how can I tell what processes that are running in the background are doing for me, as there are a few with the same name & what's the easiest way to get rid of any redundant ones from my hard drive & will I need to do any registry editing to stop them coming back?

Any help at all would be appreciated.:ok:

Cheers

Donkey

[Loose rivets]

Process Explorer by Sysinternals


Recommended on this forum, and I've found it quite good...and Free.

[green granite]

CCcleaner is free, it will clean out all crap and you can use it to clean up the registry

[Donkey497]

Thanks Guys.

[P.Pilcher]

I must admit that an up-to-date version of XP seems to run much more sluggishly that it used to. About 6 months ago, I decided to update my main machine. I purchased a new case, PSU, mobo, dual core CPU, 3 gig of RAM and a 250 gig hard drive. On plugging it all together with my old DVD ROM drive, it all worked, much to my suprise. I then installed an old version of XP which did not even have the benefit of SP1. It seemed to fly - I had forgotton just how fast it was. Now that copy of XP has been modified to death and been brought completely up to date. It's much more sluggish now - or seems to be - and Office XP also now has to be modified to death to make it run properly which was certainly not the case when XP first came out. But we know that Microshaft's policy is exactly that. Thank heavens for Open Office. My 1999 copy of Corel 9 still runs perfectly.

P.P.

[Tarq57]

In regard to any particular process, try "Googling" the process name.
Also try process explorer. SysInternals also have a forum (http://forum.sysinternals.com/forum_topics.asp?FID=2) where a search might often reveal a lot about some of the processes you are interested in.
How to delete any process? Usually best done by (if applicable) setting the program that calls it into existence to not start with Windows, or disabling the service (if not needed) that calls on it.
See Black Viper- Super Tweaks for XP (http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/supertweaks.htm) an extensive instructional site on how (and why) to do (and not to do) this. Many windows processes are listed on this site. It's surprising how many can be set to manual without problem.
Try Secunia PSI (http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/) (Personal Software Inspector) to assist with the monitoring of vulnerabilities due to out of date software on your system.
This will start with windows, but can be set not to.
I use Startup Delayer (http://www.r2.com.au/) to help speed the boot of the computer, while still allowing programs I prefer to run with Windows to (eventually) start. If using this, all security apps should not be delayed. Anything else - if it's not connected to the OS, is fair game.