How many processes/thread are youre Thinkpad OS running?

[Torque]

Hi thinkpad forums.

Due to a small incident with Opera earlier, I had to enter the Taskmanager and shut down a process.
In doing so, I saw the total amount of processes running was a staggering 67!

Thats... ALOT. I mean, my desktop machine only runs about 30-35 processes with XP, after a boot.

I know there are alot of services involved in running the Thinkpad. Like powermanagement and such. I cant identify all the processes by name, so im not too keen on entering msconfig and shutting stuff down on startup.

So just out of interest, how many processes are you running?
And if any of you have a bag of tricks to tweak the standard Thinkpad package (I have kept just about all of the IBM/lenovo tools installed) and get rid of the stuff noone uses, please post em here

[jdhurst]

You are using a laptop computer and are comparing apples and oranges. Stop worrying about the number of processes. A properly tuned laptop will run at less than 2 percent CPU 95 percent of the time in a normal business workload of mail, internet, word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. I have about 80 processes running at this moment, CPU is at 0 percent and the hard drive is idle. ... JD Hurst

[JHEM]

For the record, at the moment I have 76 processes running, but I've got about 10 Firefox tabs open, Outlook and OE both open, Adobe open (full package, not just the Reader), Windows Explorer and IE.

More important than the number of processes you have running is what percentage your CPU is running at and how much memory is being used, both under 20% on my T41p (1.7GHz, 7K100, 2GB).

Regards,

James

[bill bolton]

I also have 76 processes running, with low CPU utilisation, on a T43. The number of processes is not significant in itself, as noted above.

Cheers,

Bill

[DIGITALgimpus]

About 80 processes, 1% CPU on average (that intel wifi process occasionally polling). 1GB RAM free on boot. Will be 1.5 when I upgrade my RAM again soon.

[christopher_wolf]

On average, I have around 71 processes on my T43 as I do right now.

This includes Opera, Winamp, Miranda, TeXnicCenter, X1, AC, HDAPS, AVG, Kerio, Vim, and Visual FORTAN. CPU usage averages less than 1% at idle and less than 256MB utilized, right now I am using around 153MB of RAM, for all processes.

[DIGITALgimpus]

Wow, what are you doing to have so little RAM occupied? hmm

[christopher_wolf]

Wow, what are you doing to have so little RAM occupied? hmm

That is what everything totals up to for the active RAM.

I generally try to use optimized programs; Miranda for all my IM and IRC needs, supports full Vista-Aeroglass-like transparencies and fades without going over 10MB (funny, the Explorer menu animations put a larger load on the CPU...imagine that), then Winamp scaled down to 50% on full opacity, opaque on hover, and then Opera. I use Miranda instead of AIM, ICQ, and the Yahoo! native clients because they each manage to suck up lots of resources for nothing much in return.

Here is a screenshot; See

https://webfiles.berkeley.edu:443/chris ... enshot.PNG

Tinyapps.org is also a great site to visit to find low-resource footprint programs that get the job done. I usually prefer a program I can get in an archive compression format and simply unzip to a folder and use rather than download a full and bloated installer for what ends up being a simple application.

There are also certain utilities that let you reclaim memory and defrag your RAM; RAMPage is one of them (http://www.jfitz.com/software/RAMpage/ ; no spyware.) although, technically, WinXP's garbage collector works well enough so as to render no difference between the two. RAMpage does free up a bit more RAM, but some applications run slower since all the threads spawned in RAM now point to the pagefile on the HDD. You may or may not notice any difference.

[sugo]

About 26 processes after windows login.

[KristianJ]

43 processes at the moment on my T40...not that it ever really has any reason to concern me - that's about par for the course with my usual browsing habits.

[turbolium]

48 processes cpu idle at 0 to 2%