Too many processes in Vista!

I was used to having, at most, 45 processes running when I used XP. However, I noticed that I have an average of 65 processes running in Vista. It seems as if hard drive activity in my new Studio 1555 never stops. Is this normal?

 

I've got 69 right now. It's pretty average; Vista just does more than XP.

 

I have vista 64bit installed and as of now 48 processes running.

I followed this guide to cut down unnecessary processes - http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=166532&highlight=vista+tweaks

 

I have 34 running at startup With Vista ultimate 64

 

haha. I've got 82 processes. Vista Home Premium 32-bit

 

Only 17 running with XP pro

 

Thats pretty normal. Vista requires more than XP, and there are certain things that you can disable like kendoisonfire had mentioned, theres a tweak guide that will help cut down some things that run in the background. The page does a good job on directions for disabling some of Vista's features as well as explain what they are so you can decided whether you want to disable it or not.

 

Yup. There are several ways to reduce processes on Vista, although unless you're willing to run a program like vLite to do drastic measures, you'll be very lucky to get much below 45. Even after applying Les's tweak guide and BlackViper's tweak guides, I'm at 42 processes. Now before anyone goes crying that that's too many processes, keep in mind that Vista likes memory for a reason. It's not to aggravate you or to make you cry about a vista score, but because of a little novelty called superfetch that allows it to pre-load programs you most frequently use. Right now, with only AIM and FF3.5.1 running as my foreground programs, but other little vista goodies in the back, I have 42. Being as you're posting this in the DELL section, I'm going to give you a little list of things that you can do to reduce the number of processes.

1. Reformat and reinstall the OS to get a clean image
2. Use Les's Vista Tweak guide (link at bottom) and tweak with discretion
3. Use BlackViper's tweaks to tweak Vista a bit more (link at bottom)
4. Turn off a lot of the "vista prettiness" that eats up memory
5. GET MORE MEMORY!

I am assuming you have a 64-bit ready computer. If so, and if the bios can handle it, upgrade the RAM as well. You can do all the software tweaks you want, but there is no substitute for more RAM and a bigger HDD to use as paging file when needed. What you haven't mentioned though is your computer or your OS or your current memory state, so I have assumed some of these remedies for you.

Here's the links
Les's Vista Tweak Guide
BlackViper's Services Tweak Guide
BlackViper's SuperTweaks for Vista.

(Please note, I am only linking to these as they work for me in improving performance, and use them at your own discretion. Neither myself nor the composers of these links bear responsibility for your indiscretions.) There's also nothing wrong with just good ol' fashioned upgrading of RAM and maybe CPU either.

Jason

 

I have 59 processes, maybe because I am running a 64-Bit OS. I have been in your shoes about the hard drive activity never stopping. Its called "disk thrash" the main culprit is Superfecth, it can easily be disabled in Services. Some say it speeds your system up. And makes things load faster, all it does is constantly keep the hdd spinning, eating up battery life, and heating up your hard drive causing the fans to kick in further eating up battery life. Plus if you have an SSD it won't make that faster. Also I tried a while ago, a 8GB USB 2.0 Thumb drive connected to my 1737, using ReadyBoost, that does similar stuff, but again it really causes the disk to thrash since it tries to load what it thinks will will open based on your previous behavior and patterns so it tries to predict. If you can deal with Superfetch eventually it does work, I prefer to disable it. My hard drive light rarely goes off zero spinning or use unless its doing what I want.