T400 w Vista Ultimate - how many processes

Just got my T400 in yesterday and started playing around with Vista for the first time.

Everything's running smoothly so far. The only thing I found strange was that there were 98 processes running!! Coming off of XP, where even 50 processes seems high, is 98 high for Vista?

I think I might have to wipe everything and do a clean install.

 

80 with many default services disabled here, running Business x64, clean install

 

I get around 55-60 with a clean install.
it's all the applications of Lenovo that are using so many processes. remove those you do not need. or do a clean install and watch your laptop fly

 

yep 55-60 after clean install.
75 after some thinkvantage applications have been installed and few vista processes turned off in msconfig.

 

Even so Vista is still better than XP as an option for T400. I have used both of them on T400 and I found that I gained more battery life in Vista. Also, the machine ran faster.

 

Instead of trying to decrease the amount of processes to a number as low as possible, try actually using your system and see if you run into any performance issues. If you do, try to figure out what they are caused by; Chances are the currently running processes are not the culprit at all

And as with "tweaking" Windows services, you may find certain programs/features of your laptop not working, without anything more than a marginal or even imaginary performance increase.

Vista allows switching between graphics chips/cards without rebooting, XP does not, one major benefit of the former.

In the end, it comes down to what you, the user wants. Good luck with however you choose to run your system

 

Don't get me wrong. I don't have any problems with Vista, its just that I noticed the hard drive light flashing constantly when I turn on my computer and get to the login screen. Before even logging in its still going for a good minute or so, if I just let it sit there.

This is why it figured it was all those extra processes intializing and taking up resources.

Once I'm logged in, there's still a few things starting up that I probably don't need. For example, I think some of the Lenovo stuff that starts up is reduntant with things that also start up in Windows. No need to run two processes that do essentially the same thing for my purposes.

 

The hard drive light is most likely caused by Superfetch. This is Vista's intellegent prefetch cache that loads frequently used data from the hard drive into RAM (it uses all the RAM you have available). It has to regularly flush and fill this cache and this causes high activity.

I was concerned about the drive never spinning down myself. However, Superfetch seems to improve overall system response time, and I get better battery life in Vista than XP, so I just left it on.

Most of the ThinkVantage tools do have value. The only one I would say you definitely don't need is EasyEject, almost all the other ones have value. Check this thread where I go over every one in detail.