Windows XP question

[Danny Danzi]

Hi guys,

Sorry if this may not be the proper forum to address this, but I figured I'd take a shot. I recently bought a new Creation Station loaded with XP on it and I've never used XP until this machine. I've noticed that quite a few things run in the background (looks like 20 on my end with no programs running, just a few shared folders and a printer) that appear to be system files. I noticed this increased after updating my OS to SP2.

My question is, do any of you know roughly how many things are supposed to be running on XP at default? Like if you press ctrl, alt, del, how many system type things absolutely NEED to be running? I know this depends on the characteristics of your pc's needs like drivers for video or printer stuff, storage or whatever else. But like on 98, I could get away with killing everything except Explorer. Nothing else needed to be running to make the actual OS work properly...and though you may laugh, I'm one of the few that actually had a very stable time with 98 while using it that way. Booting up at 98% resources with nothing running sure was nice. :)

Mind you, I'm not having any issues at all with my CS rack, but do I really need 20 things running that say "sys"? I did a file search on each thing and they seem to be associated with windows system, and I never go near there. As of now, these things in the background use about 150mb of RAM and I have 2 gigs, so that's not really an issue. But I sure would love to kill some of these things if they aren't needed and won't make the system unstable by not allowing them to run. What would be the least amount of things needed to run the system? Thanks in advance!

[TimOBrien]

Here's a website that'll educate you on tuning XP for music:

http://www.musicxp.net/

HOWEVER: If your PC is running well and can do everything you need, my advice is to LEAVE IT ALONE. Tweaking can do some serious harmfull things if you don't know what you're doing or how to get back to where it was.

The first thing I do when I get a DAW is to test it. I load up 35 stereo 24bit/44.1kHz files (more of my standard-setting tracks than I ever use) and see what the CPU meter tells me. And test out a few plug-ins to see what impact they have on the system. If I'm happy, I don't go crazy trying to tweak a few meaningless percentage points that'll never do me any good but might make my system unstable....

[Justin]

The optimizations we ran on the system during setup should have it paired down to the bare minimum that you need to do audio production.

It's usually ok to leave system processes alone.

You'll typically see installed software showing up as "USER" processes, those are ones that you'll often want to shut down. They're often things like tray notification icons and such.

[Danny Danzi]

Thanks for the quick response guys, much appreciated. :)

[ajmicek]

Sounds like you are coming from Windows 98, where less running almost no processes was a good thing. If I remember, you can get it down to just "Explorer" running and things will be fine. This is not the case for Windows XP. I tweak my XP install _heavily_ and your statement:


As of now, these things in the background use about 150mb of RAM

is a _very_ good sign. I have gotten my system down to around 210mb on startup. If I were you, (especially with that amount of RAM) I would leave it alone. Also, to aviod grunging things up with unnecessary startup processes and services, try to avoid installing any programs you don't absolutely need ... just to make maitenance easier.