I'd like to know wich processes I could safely remove, both in "normal" use and when playing LFS ...

could you explain what the following are?
tschelp.exe
SnagIt32.exe
StarWindService.exe
sdhelp.exe
guard.exe
ad-watch.exe

You could remove... (When in LFS)
mantispam.exe (mcaffe anti-spam by the sounds of things)
avg[anything after that].exe (AVG anti-virus)

*tip: if you are curious about any of these things just put the whole filename (including the .exe) into google and you should find out right away what each is and how important it is.

You can use google to search for the processess. For example, starwindservice.exe gives this result;
Description:
starwindservice.exe is a process which belongs to Alcohol 120% and provides network drive sharing capabilities to this product. This program is a non-essential process, but should not be terminated unless suspected to be causing problems.

Also, http://www.processlibrary.com is nice.

SnagIt32.exe - Program I used to capture the screen ( SnagIt . Nice one btw )
tschelp.exe - SnagIt Component
ad-watch.exe - The active spyware quard - part of Ad-Aware 1.06
sdhelp.exe - Spyware Doctor Helper
StarWindService.exe - Hmm why I have this recollection, that it had
to do with somekind of copy protection forexample for rFactor, that I have.
Though I'm propably wrong ...

Yeah I got to Google a bit, but if someone really KNOWS these, and has
the experience/s to share I would still appreciate it.

P.S. I found also this, and going to take a look in the evening
http://www.processlibrary.com

LoL U see I'm kind of thinking out loud , and answering to my own questions too heheh,
and Google IS my friend ... I sometimes just need a little motivation by doing like this, which is weird, but then again that's partly what I am =_0

Of the first 29 listed, I would say the only thing to keep is the svchost.exe files as you never know what those are, which there are 4 out of the first 29. Then keep ctfmon.exe out of the 29 as well. I can't remember what that is, but I think I got errors when I ended mine thus needing to reboot. That takes you down to about 15 processes which is around where I'm running at with pretty much the same names as what you would have.

This is all for the racing and not websurfing, etc. And, I'm on dialup, so I don't mess around with having firewalls and antivirus crap clogging up my system.

Oh, and I see 2 files as CLI.exe. I can't remember what that is either. I may have that one running. That gives you 16 of the 38 you have currently giving it a huge weight reduction diet. I actually have 18, but the extra 2 over the 16 I see on yours would be for my second PC and the internet sharing stuff (no router, I just run it through my main PC).

Your ATI card should run just fine without those ati*** files. Mine does. You shouldn't need rFactor unlocking/security if you are racing LFS, right? hehehe. Unless you are having problems with your sound, I doubt you need sndhelp.exe running.

SnagIt you would want only if you were capturing screenshots all the time. FYI, I use FSScreen.exe. It is only 16k as opposed to your 6,456k + 2,676k SnagIt. But it only captures in .bmp format and you have to convert to jpeg manually with something else later.

Thanks Mike

Mind you, the performance increase from shutting down a few of those is next to nothing probably.

There was this big thing on the net a while a go regarding Black Vipers popular winXP 'services settings', a similar thing. It made sense: running less background things makes things faster, but it appeared that it was actually marginally slowing things down in benchmarks!


It can be worth to Google the list, to make sure there is no 'dodgy' stuff in there but for performance increase, you're probably not going to notice anything.

Yeah I have to agree on that one after some experimenting
The thought came from having still a while an ancient set ( XP1700+ 640SDram , Radeon 9250i ) though i have to praise Scawier for making
such an awesome programming job, that it's very playable ( if less than 20 online same time at some tracks SOclassic forexample. Depends on ping too)
Planning of course to upgrade soon as possible, but the setup hasn't cost me in a 4 year period more than 150€ (including red MOMO bought as new in 2004 and a DVDR), due to working a year in a recycling center. I mean that the Momo is still as good as new though driven since new DVDR less a year old (50€) and 21" CRT ( 2001 model , but used just one year)
So i think i have got my moneys worth of fun.

"All the answers that work" great little site for figuring out what task program is and what they suggest to do with it.

Like the ctfmon that rodgers was talking about...example:

CTFMon comes with Microsoft Office XP and Windows XP – it activates the Alternative User Input Text Input Processor (TIP) and the Microsoft Office XP Language Bar. As long as the Text Services & Speech are enabled in the Control Panel, this program will force itself back into your list of background programs.

Recommendation :
In 2006 CTFMON is needed on many PCs for Windows Update to work – we suggest, therefore, that you leave it running.


Enjoy.

Thx Ant

Hopefully this will help others ( who are lost LOL ) too.

This was helpful site too : http://www.processlibrary.com/