tweak mania

did some major tweaking of my inspiron 9300

down to 14 processes, +5 for my virus scanner/firewall, +1 for task manager which normally is not open

Basically all I did was find out exactly what I need on a daily basis and disable the rest

see screenshot

 

Not bad, are you feeling any performance improvement?

 

Yeah what type of perfs are you getting. Hell I managed to get mine down to around 40 after some service cutting and picked up great performance, can't imagine what you're experiencing!

There's a great thread on the forums somewhere here about further tweaking things, and I noticed very fast startup times just from moving around boot files.

 

what happens if u disable something udk about...and then something won't work in your laptop??...can u reenable it w/o any problems??

 

I'm a big fan of editing startup items, many programs like to use constant monitoring for updates, keystroke monitors, etc. that really have no business eating up my CPU/memory. As long as you occasionally check for updates manually, anything that's not a system item will run just fine when you start the program yourself.

I'm a little wary of services tweaks though... I tried a lot of the changes suggested by the link in Bootleg's thread here, and even following the guidelines for "normal" use, I noticed a lot of things just didn't seem to work right... and since I'm not nearly savvy enough to trace which program uses which services when, I just used System restore to reset (thankfully I didn't disable it ), and decided to stick to editing the few startup items I know EXACTLY what they do.

Some tweak guides really are for "everyone", but a lot of times, people who really know what they are doing forget exactly how little the rest of us know

 

Its best to enable restore before you start such tweaking if you're not too sure of what you're doing. But in normal cases (if windows reboots) and you think that you need the service, you can always reenable it.

Of the top of my head, there is things to turn off for most users. Acrobat Reader (version 6 and 7) have an on start up thing that makes them launch faster when you actually need them, but I find that totally useless (+ eats up resources) , since I am not always using acrobat, + it doesn't take much time to launch anyway!

And for MatLab users, it runs a server, whose function is unknown to me, that eats up 50MB of RAM at least. I have never found a problem running without it!