Best way to kill unwanted processes in WinXP

[jimbojones 2]

Just wondering what techniques people use to stop un-needed processes before they play Arma.  I go through and kill some programs through the task manager before I run Arma but i figure their must be an easier way or a program that could set up a custom profile for you?  Just curious how people free up some resources before playing

[Lepardi 0]

Disable all the unneeded services from even launching, go to start -> run -> msconfig and disable them.

[-=seany=- 5]

Search Google for a program called "EndItAll"

[Infam0us 10]

Search Google for a program called "EndItAll"

Like the poster said, this is the best program!

[suma 8]

I think killing background processes is something which is overrated, and unless you are running something which is badly designed, I doubt you will get any measurable gain. A well behaved background process which is running on Low or Idle priority, using less than 1 % of CPU power, a few MB of memory and doing almost non disk access is almost non detectable.

Of course, there may be some background processes which are badly designed, but I would recommend instead of killing them before running ArmA to uninstall them completely and search for a well designed replacement.

[xxbbcc 6]

Suma is right. You shouldn't kill processes unless you need to. When you kill a process (as opposed to closing it properly), you don't know if all system resources associated to it are correcly freed up or not.

With services, just go to Control Panel->Admin Tools->Services and set the startup type to manual/disabled to services you don't need. If you bought your computer from a place like Circuit City/Best Buy/Tesco or some similar big chain, it's more than likely that you have loads of unnecessary programs running. You should consider uninstalling them if you don't use/need them.

[guerilla -MCY- 0]

i recommend TuneUp Utilities 2008, here's the trial page:

http://www.tune-up.com/download

features:

Powerful hard drive defragmentation Optimum start-up, Internet, and Windows acceleration Quick and extensive clean-up for hard drives Effective elimination of junk data Fully-automatic clean-up and improvement of your PC Extensive clean-up of the registry Effective help in solving standard Windows problems Secure data recovery and data elimination Simple custom Windows configuration Individual Windows styling

[xxbbcc 6]

I strongly advise you against using such "clean-up" utilities. You have no idea what they try to clean up and how they would go about it. Your best option is to uninstall the programs that you don't need.

Alternatively, you can download Autoruns from www.sysinternals.com and turn off the auto-start of unnecessary programs. Be aware, that this is a developer utility and it assumes that you know what you're doing when turning off things. (It's free for personal use.)

By using it, your programs stay installed but they don't start when you run your computer. If you need their services, you'll have to launch them manually.

You can post a list of all your processes here if you want a bit more help. (Take a screenshot of Task Manager's Processes tab. If you do so, check the Show processes from all users checkbox on the bottom.)

[Lou Montana 101]

I think killing background processes is something which is overrated, and unless you are running something which is badly designed, I doubt you will get any measurable gain. A well behaved background process which is running on Low or Idle priority, using less than 1 % of CPU power, a few MB of memory and doing almost non disk access is almost non detectable.

Of course, there may be some background processes which are badly designed, but I would recommend instead of killing them before running ArmA to uninstall them completely and search for a well designed replacement.

I noticed something about this statement, it's the "Folding @ Home" (medical computing @ home) process, FAH504-Console.exe and FahCore_82.exe, even if they are running on "low priority" are badly handled with ArmA going on.

It was screwing up the game on the launch quite 20-40s before going well on patch 1.12b ; now since 1.14 it's ok, but I do kill it in case of, as my Apache/SQL/FTP servers. : )

My advise is at least do quit programs that are writing on your disk (P2P, auto-defrag, etc) as ArmA is supposed to have a total access to data.

[Commando84 0]

i had a friend that had computer that he tried playing fear on when it first came out and it lagged like 15 fps.

Then he shutdown explorer.exe before he started the game with the run command and voila game worked even better than before incredible..

I dunno if it was badly designed or just old parts and a very demanding game but intresting anyways.

[Deathstruck 375]

but shutting explorer.exe shutdowns also your PC no(?)

[ck-claw 1]

but shutting explorer.exe shutdowns also your PC no(?)

Afaik no?

Just turns all short cuts etc off and just leaves your wallpaper up?

Obviously theres more to it than that!

[subs17 9]

I think killing background processes is something which is overrated, and unless you are running something which is badly designed, I doubt you will get any measurable gain. A well behaved background process which is running on Low or Idle priority, using less than 1 % of CPU power, a few MB of memory and doing almost non disk access is almost non detectable.

Of course, there may be some background processes which are badly designed, but I would recommend instead of killing them before running ArmA to uninstall them completely and search for a well designed replacement.

That depends if anti-virus scanning is on it can drastically effect performance of some sims. I have one sim where if the anti-virus auto scanning is on(we are not talking a virus scan as such but scanning of active programs) it will take 30minutes to load the game opposed to 2minutes with auto scanning off.

[echo1 0]

I strongly advise you against using such "clean-up" utilities. You have no idea what they try to clean up and how they would go about it. Your best option is to uninstall the programs that you don't need.

Ive been using Tune Up Utils for about 5 years now, and Ive had no problems. Then again, the money you spend on it could be put towards a RAM upgrade, which is an infinitely better way to get more memory space.

[jimbojones 2]

Thank you all for your comments. I was just trying to squeeze every last bit of performance out of my machine. I had some printer utilities that were running and it seems one of them gets hung once in a while and eats up some CPU. I disabled that and will see how things run. Thanks again

[xxbbcc 6]

Ive been using Tune Up Utils for about 5 years now, and Ive had no problems.

I don't know that particular utility, so I cannot add anything useful about that. But I'm a software engineer and I know how data is stored in the registry, so I know that doing a proper clean-up utility is very far from being trivial. I'm glad that this particular software worked out for you, but in general any registry cleaner should be untrusted.