 | By Fred Langa Some of the software running in the background on your PC does nothing but unnecessarily bog down your system. There’s a right way and a wrong way to prevent needless processes from tying up your machine’s resources, so let me show you a method that won’t bring you grief. |
A process of elimination for Windows processes
Glenn Haring voiced a problem almost every Windows user faces at one time or another:
- “Where can I learn about processes that are running on my XP system and know which ones I can turn off to save system resources? Can you help me understand how to control what starts up every time I boot up? I know I always have ‘junk’ running that I almost never use.”
The clutter and wasted disk space were bad enough, but as you suggest, some of these items were running at every startup. They consumed memory and CPU cycles as they sat there in the background, waiting for me to call on them, even though I never would. I stripped them out. But I didn’t do it by killing their “processes,” and I suggest you avoid axing processes as well.
Here’s why: you can think of a process as a low-level mini-program that’s launched by other software to handle a specific task or tasks. A single mainstream application or utility may launch many separate processes. The operating system launches many others.
Because the processes running on your PC are the result of other software running, the best way to eliminate unnecessary processes is to eliminate the unnecessary software. This way, the needless processes won’t start in the first place, and that’s much better than trying to kill processes after they’re running.
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