Thinkpad pre-installed software

[Bunzer]

Hi there. I just registered on thinkpads.com. I bought a ThinkPad R52. It's hopefully going to be my "music PC" for practising and performing live.

My first impression was how smoothly everything seems to run. Installation was a breeze, performance seems to be good (for a notebook) and software/driver support seems to be first-class.

However, I have a gripe: Being a music PC, it will have high speed and resource demands on it, so my first job is to optimise the system. I checked the base memory footprint and was horrified to see it was over 250MB!!

I've spent several hours over the last few days, trying to work out what non-standard services and startup programs are actually necessary (or at least useful) - which is how I managed to find this forum.

There are a few topics here which have come in useful, but are not particularly comprehensive. I wondered if anyone thought it might be a good idea to compile a FAQ on the subject?

Of course, I did things in the wrong order, and discovered a new Lenovo Thinkpad software update program last night. It did a very good job of updating the machine specific software (and BIOS), but left me with a base RAM footprint of nearly 250MB again - but this time with some new process names

I have only spent an hour browsing this forum so far, so I may have missed something. Please forgive me if I'm digging up a well-covered subject unnecessarily.

[d lehmann]

I don't know what your total ram is but there is nothing wrong with 256 free. Don't forget your ram is there to be used, not to sit there idle and empty.
A simple method to free up the resources is to create another hardware configuration. I use this for video encoding. Go to> Control Panel>System>Hardware Tab>Hardware Profiles>Copy and make a resource hog free configuration. It requires a reboot, then go to all your hardware devices and disable uneccesary devices in that profile (eg. nic, modem, unused ports, firewire etc) I created a new xp account called encode and disabled all software startup and background services not needed. For encoding, I even went so far as to set the vid card to vga basic.
This really streamlines the computer for a specific purpose, with the only downside being that you must reboot to change configs each time.
May be an option for you.

[d lehmann]

posting error

[Bunzer]

After some experimentation, I got it down to 160MB. This was a combination of disabling the usual unnecessary Windows services and removing a lot of IBM-specific startup entries from the registry and services list.

I run resource-hogging software to process many channels of audio in real-time, so I need as much free ram and CPU time as I can muster. I have 512MB installed, so I've effectively just increased free RAM by 35%, and I bet I could squeeze out a bit more, given time and information.

RAM is there to be used, but not by software which doesn't actually do anything of any use to me. I don't want to hit the 512MB mark and start disk thrashing, just because there's a service running which allows unused hotkeys to operate, or helps me change video settings with my kneecap, or tells me how much charge my battery has in big green letters - it's unnecessary for my requirements.

I'd like to know what all these unfamiliar programs are needed for, so I can chop them out of my config (or not) and run my TP more efficiently.

It's a pain to have to rely on Spyware web sites to find out what they might be for. Official IBM documentation would be nice, but in the absence of that, a user-compiled list would help seemingly quite a few interested parties to run streamlined systems.

BTW the only non-standard processes I have left are:
ibmprc
igfxpers
rrpcsb
SynTPEnh
SynTPLpr
TPHDEXLG
TpShocks

I'm guessing that some of these are necessary, but, lacking the relevant info, I'm not sure if any of these can go too.

[GomJabbar]

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=14185

[Bunzer]

Thanks for that GomJabbar, but that's the first topic I read when I came here.

The list I saw installed on my TP was much longer than that - I had to scroll the process list on 1024x768, it was so long.

There were several startup files for audio and video which I removed and seemed to have no effect on the usability of the computer; there were services installed which seemed to provide duplicate functionality to existing Windows services like Wireless config and Power Management. But, without any documentation, I was left to guess if they were required.

So, I repeat my original question - is anyone interested in compiling a full list, with detailed explanations of the process uses? If so, I can help with some of the stuff I've learned already.