How many processes?

[Balmoral Green]

On a typical home PC, that doesnt get used for much, how many processes should be running?

Thanks.

[aldi]

There isnt really a fixed answer. If you do a clean install of XP youself with the minimum installed then maybe <50 ish, if you buy a new dell with every free offer and trial software under the sun loaded onto it out of the box then maybe a hundred? A good thing to check is what the 'commit charge' is in task manager after you boot to a desktop without opening anything up, a clean normal system with print monitors, java updates, quicktime updates etc. etc. will be well under 200,000 and a well clean one under 150,000.

[ThatPhilBrettGuy]

Depending on if there's virus checkers and other icon tray utils running usually about 30 to 40.

[FourWheelDrift]

I'm running 44 including Firefox, Thunderbird and a couple of other apps.

[ThePassenger]

54 on mine, with FF, TB and a selection of apps.

It varies a great deal I'm afraid, it depends on the software load and what is active.

[Plotloss]

Depends on how the code has been written...

[Balmoral Green]

Running 50 processes, and commit charge is 307,000 approx.

It just seems a bit busy lately, like its got far too much to be getting on with without paying any attention to doing what I want it to do at the click of a mouse. Its not as quick to open and close even simple applications as it used to be.

I regularly run crap cleaner and anti virus scans.

Thanks anyway folks.

[aldi]

307MB is a lot if that's just sitting on the desktop - might be worth arranging the process list by size and working through them, seeing what's taking up all the memory. If you've got 256MB or less the machine will crawl a bit with that much allocated.

[FourWheelDrift]

aldi said:

307MB is a lot if that's just sitting on the desktop

Oh bugger, 406 with only 43 running, peaked at 968

[ThePassenger]

FourWheelDrift said:

aldi said:

307MB is a lot if that's just sitting on the desktop

Oh bugger, 406 with only 43 running, peaked at 968

C'mmer you 3d rendering / video editing / game playing monkey so I can slap you

[Rednut05]

windows XP: 30 processes with Firefox, Msn, and antivrius running, and well task amnager is open to check so I guess 29 standard.

If the amount of processes is annoying you. You can download a guide here that'll tell you what processes you need running at start up, need running at all and what ones are even security risks.

Windows will load quicker as less services/ processes will be running in the RAM.

Edited by Rednut05 on Tuesday 28th November 15:19

[Balmoral Green]

Rednut05 said:

If the amount of processes is annoying you. You can download a guide here that'll tell you what processes you need running at start up, need running at all and what ones are even security risks.

Windows will load quicker as less services/ processes will be running in the RAM.

Thanks.