Poll of the Week: Processes Running after 10 min of Idling?

[eecon]

This Poll is only for WinXP Machines and not running on batteries.

Please let them idle at least 10 minutes after a cold power-up.

Thanks

[rkawakami]

I generally have less than 50 processes running on any of my T23 machines. However, this includes several utilities that I keep running in the system tray or which launches at startup; AVG Free 8.5, 4T Tray Minimizer, MobileMeter, XNeat Windows Manager, DS Clock, Belkin Wireless Utility. The T23 that I'm using at the moment has 47 processes, which includes Firefox, Agent and a DOS window.

Not sure what the significance of letting the system idle for 10 minutes has to do with the process load. Is that to let any Windows background task(s) to start?

edit: Fired up another T23 and let it sit for 20 minutes. There are 40 processes running. 5 of them are related to AVG. Also running are Acrotray (Adobe Acrobat), Palm Hotsync, two iPod/iTunes processes, two Java update processes (for the latest Java version that's waiting to be installed), as well as utilities 4-T Tray, Belkin Wireless, DS Clock and Thinkpad Configuration. So if I get rid of all the non-essential stuff, I can probably get it down to 30. This is on a AC powered WinXP SP2 system with 1GB of memory.

[dsvochak]

Is there a point to this poll other than counting processes? The reason I ask is I was under the impression "whether the number of processes has any impact on performance" has been answered by jdhurst numerous times. (p.s. Answer: No)

[basketb]

I'm intrigued, why does it matter for this poll whether you run on batteries or not?
And why would you let your computer idle for 10 minutes? Isn't that a waste of energy?

[eecon]

I'm intrigued, why does it matter for this poll whether you run on batteries or not?
And why would you let your computer idle for 10 minutes? Isn't that a waste of energy?

Please correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that some services shut themselves down after a power-up within a few minutes and other services shut down when switching to battery power so as to conserve power. After some Spring cleaning, I'm now down from 63 to 51 processes and have noticed some faster bootup and S/D times (maybe 10-12 seconds improvement). The T61p also "feels" snappier, FWIW.

As for letting a computer idle for a few minutes, my wife and I have accumulated (in spirit) many tons of future CO2, NOx and ROC/VOC emission reduction credits .... we voluntarily chose years ago to adopt existing children rather than create our own brand-new future pollution emitters.

There's absolutely no guilt on my end about not conserving energy and I thoroughly enjoy all my old and big high polluting classic cars, motorhome, boat and small plane. We've already done more than our part to save the world by practicing ZPG.

We don't hear much about ZPG any more ..... I wonder why?

[RealBlackStuff]

OT:
the Chinese seem to practice their own form of ZPG.
Reason is, because of the old one child per family rule, lots of peopled killed baby girls because they wanted boys.
Now there are not enough girls for all those boys. Involuntary ZPG or plain Catch-22?

[basketb]

...Please correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that some services shut themselves down after a power-up within a few minutes and other services shut down when switching to battery power so as to conserve power...

Interesting, I never paid attention to this. Do you happen to know which processes/services these are?

[eecon]

Interesting, I never paid attention to this. Do you happen to know which processes/services these are?

Probably mostly semi-useless scanning services ...... Just open Task Manager immediately after you boot up and then again after about 10 minutes .... I start with about 58 now and soon end up with only about 51. If you really are interested you could try Process Explorer v11.33:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 96653.aspx

Happy Spring Cleaning

[jdhurst]

I have 115 processes running on my Vista machine and had about 90 running on my XP laptop. Processes use memory (and I have lots of that), otherwise they are benign. Properly set up and tuned at the application level, they don't use any appreciable resource (<2% CPU for the last 6 years) and don't bother me at all. ... JDH

[eecon]

I have 115 processes running on my Vista machine and had about 90 running on my XP laptop. Processes use memory (and I have lots of that), otherwise they are benign. Properly set up and tuned at the application level, they don't use any appreciable resource (<2% CPU for the last 6 years) and don't bother me at all. ... JDH

The amount of processes running is usually a function of all the different software one has loaded and is running. I'm gusessing that if you just want a stationary machine to safely surf the internet, read and send emails, and maybe type and print an occassional letter, then one probably does not need more than 30 processes in a stripped down WinXP clean machine.