How Many Computer Tasks

[Pete Simmons]

If you hit ctrl/alt/del and look at the number of tasks running how many do you have?

I run Win XP Home and use to have about 40 tasks running.

I have been studying and eliminating tasks and have around 30 now.


I use a 5 or 6 year old Dell Pent computer for the laser. I only have 512 meg of memory. For the type of memory I need to add it is over $100 for 1 Gig. Before I put that into an old computer I might just buy a new mother bd and 2 gig of memory and transfer all the other hardware over.

So for a fix to my slow computer I started looking at what was running.

That is what got me going on this.

[Matt Wheeler]

I run a pretty clean install, with Corel Draw running, I have 23.

[John Noell]

What matters most is the amount of CPU time being taken up by all those tasks and the interrupt priority assigned to each of them. Most background tasks are unlikely to be significantly slowing you down. That said, the newer processors (both Intel Core 2 Duo and AMD Phenom) are a LOT faster that anything 5 or 6 years old. (Of course they need different motherboards, different memory, etc.).

[Mike Null]

I am typically running 5 or 6 on my old gateway. Why do you have so many?

Right now I'm running Corel, Quickbooks, Trotec Job Control, Outlook and Internet Explorer.

I'm running XP Home with 768 ram.

[Chris Stites]

Here are a few things I do to keep my XP computer performance in top shape:


Defrag my hard drive
Get and use a registry cleanup tool
Scan my hard drive for errors
Remove all temporary files
Scan my computer for viruses and spyware
Look at what tasks are in startup
Anti-virus software can hurt performance - if your computer is isolated from the internet you can disable it
Hope this helps.

[Darren Null]

31, but most of them aren't needed when I'm off the net.
This site is worth looking at:
http://www.blackviper.com/
...it explains what all those services/processes are and whether you need them or not...XP & Vista

[Dan Hintz]

I use a 5 or 6 year old Dell Pent computer for the laser. I only have 512 meg of memory. For the type of memory I need to add it is over $100 for 1 Gig.
I highly doubt you'd pay that much if you did a little shopping around (you don't have to purchase memory from Dell). I just put 2Gigs of PC8600 mem in a new machine that cost me about $60 after rebate. A system 5-6 years old should be using VERY cheap memory by now, and finding 1Gig sticks shouldn't be a problem.

[Pete Simmons]

"A system 5-6 years old should be using VERY cheap memory by now"
----------------------------
Should be but is not.

In fact it uses costly ram

SDRAM PC133 which seems to run about $50 for 512Meg.

Plus my 2 - 256 Meg sticks I would need to discard.

I am looking to upgrade the cpu anyway. Just need to decide when and to what.