HP XP Processes Which Can Be Disabled

[hershon]

It apparently is unanimous that there are too many processes running on HP even if one uses MSCONFIG. I have an HP m260n Media Center PC and have between 35-39 processes always running which HP says is about right. However, everyone on this board and another board said HP is notorious for running stuff I don't need and slowing down the computer. Can someone please go through my list of the processes running on my computer and tell me which I can disable? I didn't list memory usage next to them (they each use various amounts of memory from 25,500K to 20K) if that is important in figuring out what to disable let me know and I'll update the list. Thanks for any help offered.

Administrator

Msmsgs.exe
Agentsvr.exe
ViewMgr.exe
As.exe
Ps2.exe
CCApp.exe
Shwicon.exe
Hpsysdrv.exe
Explorer.exe
Winwood.exe
Taskmgr.exe

System

Symlcsvc.exe
Scchost.exe
Savscan.exe
Spoosv.exe
CcEvtMgr.exw
CCSetMgr.exe
Nvsvc32.exe
NAVAPSVS.EXE
Svchost.exe
Svchost.exe
Incdsrv.exe
Lsass.exe
Services.exe
Winlogin.exe
Crss.exe
Ehsched.exe
Smss.exe
Btwdins.exe
System
System Idle Process

Local Service

Alg.exe
Svchost.exe

Network Service

Svchost.exe

[N. Abstentia]

The only way to fix it is to perform a clean install, that will make a major difference.

But you can google all your processes and you can see what each of them does.

[Woochifer]

The Black Viper website has a great guide to Windows services and processes that can be disabled. Several of the ones that Windows activates by default do take up a lot of memory and serve little purpose for most users. One of the first pointers on that website is that you should deactivate the background services only through the management console, not through the MSCONFIG function or the hardware profiles, because the management console will not let you deactivate services that are need to boot up the computer.

Anyway, here's the site. After using this, I was able to recover significant memory from my system and reduce some of the nuisances (like the spam IMs you get through the Windows Messenger service, which serves little purpose unless you're on a corporate network that uses that for IT alerts).

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm