Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Normal processes for windows xp

Sorry I haven't blogged in a while but I got a little busy.

Nothing annoys me more than for a computer to be doing something it has no business doing in the first place.

What you should know is that even if you don't use your computer or tell it to do something, your computer as long as its on is always doing something behind the scenes. Your computer likes to think....ALOT. Whenever you hear those click click sounds going at a fast rate in your computer its because its busy thinking or doing something. That's fine, I don't care about that. What I care about is it doing something useless or thinking about something completely pointless. And what I mean by that is alot of times the programs that are installed onto your computer require your computers attention even when you are not running those programs. These are known as the system processes in windows xp. Now in order to view your system processes in windows xp all you have to do is press and hold the crtl button the alt button and the del or delete button at the same time. What comes up is a little window called your task manager. Now in that window your gunna see a few tabs at the top labeled different things like "applications", "processes", "performance", "networking", and "users". Click on the tab labeled processes to see everything your computer is doing in the background. You should see a pretty decent sized list. Some of that stuff in the list is important for your computer to keep functioning right and some of it is just a waste of your computers time and energy. Figuring out whats needed and whats not is a hard task and I dare not attempt to walk you through it in this blog. Each computers processes tend to be unique from one another so with out actually seeing the list myself I cant tell you what needs to be done. Instead what I can do is give you a list of basic windows xp processes that are required to keep the computer functioning. And then from this list you can compare it to what processes you have running and get an idea of the situation. So here's the list, I will also post a picture for you to see.

in no particular order:
SVCHOST.EXE (about 9 of these may be running in your list)
EXPLORER.EXE (this is what enables you to see your desktop and click on icons)
alg.exe (i forget if this one is a core system process or not lol it may have to do with a video driver
             if you dont have it dont worry about it)
LSASS.EXE
SERVICES.EXE
WINLOGON.EXE (if you dont have this one dont worry)
CSRSS.EXE
SMSS.EXE
System
System Idle Process
Computer Repair, xp processes
I black out my other processes so you can just see a list of the basic ones


That's about it for the core system processes windows xp needs in order to stay functioning.
Keep in mind something else, those are just so windows can stay on and you can use your computer like normal. It has nothing to do with your ability to connect to the Internet  wirelessly or run any other programs. Some programs do need a background system process to be running on your computer all the time or they just wont work. My advice to you is unless your experienced enough to be fooling around and shutting processes off, just don't do it. Finding out which process belongs to which program and then determining if its necessary or not is an extremely time consuming thing. I recently spent about 3 hours hunting down every process by hand and looking it up on the Internet to see what program it belonged to, for a customer of mines computer. For me its important to shut down irrelevant processes because they just sit there draining my computers overall power and speed!

By the way if you are familiar enough with your own system processes, then looking at your processes list can give you a hint as to whether or not you are infected with a virus....

9 comments:

  1. XP is surely the biggest OS on the block.
    I used to shut down one of those processes.... and got screwed 0<-<

    ReplyDelete
  2. Awesome, a list!
    Needed this for my other PC, it's old and laggy. Might free up some memory now

    ReplyDelete
  3. Wow, great information. I'll try this out sometime.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Nice to see afellow IT man, follow+

    ReplyDelete
  5. This is a lot of helpful information! A bit complicated for a beginner such as myself but i'm learning.

    ReplyDelete
  6. wew good post, im still using XP , so decent!
    +1

    ReplyDelete
  7. Excellent stuff! Trying this on my computer as I type

    ReplyDelete
  8. I like most have my fair share of computer problems and you have some great posts so followed I think :)

    ReplyDelete