safe to delete background utilities?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Chuckey
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Chuckey

Hello,

I recently purchased a new sony vaio laptop running winXP home.
the task mgr / processes tab shows a whole slew of background TSR's running,
hogging a lot of system memory, and doing doing god-only-knows-what! (i'll
list some below.) I've "ended" a lot of these processes from the task mgr
screen, with no apparent problems on computer performance, but how do I nuke
them permanently from the system, so they don't start up? Is it a registry
thing?

thanks for any comments...

chuck

Here's a list of processes I've nuked:
=========================

ApntEx.exe
Apvfb.exe
soffice.bin
soffice.exe
aolsoftware.exe
ISBMgr.exe
SPMgr.exe
RTHDCPL.exe
apoint.exe
igfxprs.exe
igfxsrvc.exe
igfxext.exe
VzFw.exe
VzCdbSvc.exe
S24EvMon.exe
VCSW.exe
VESMgr.exe
wdfmgr.exe
sqlservr.exe
hkcmd.exe

=======================
 
Your laptop will have come with various preinstalled software/utilities,
uninstall those not required.
In the task bar rt click any Icons, select properties, there may be an
option not to start with win.
 
Chuckey said:
Hello,

I recently purchased a new sony vaio laptop running winXP home.
the task mgr / processes tab shows a whole slew of background TSR's running,
hogging a lot of system memory, and doing doing god-only-knows-what! (i'll
list some below.) I've "ended" a lot of these processes from the task mgr
screen, with no apparent problems on computer performance, but how do I nuke
them permanently from the system, so they don't start up? Is it a registry
thing?
Click to expand...

There are 3 places to look: The Startup menus in your Documents & Settings
folder, Services, and the Registry.

In Docs & Settings, look under All Users as well as your own user account.
Create a "Startup Deleted" under the Start Menu\Programs folder, and move any
suspect shortcuts to that folder. Reboot. If you run into problems, start one
app at a time from the shortcut, and when you figure out which ones you really
need/want, put them back in the Startup folder and reboot.


For Services, go to Control Panel | Administrative Tools | Services and sort
them by Status. Look at the ones that are "Started" and their Startup Type.
The "Automatic" ones are the ones you need to look at; the "Manual" ones were
started by some other app or service.

Change suspect Services from Automatic to Manual startup, jot down a list of
them, and reboot. If you have problems, start them up one by one until you find
the needed ones, and change them back to Automatic. Note that Windows NEEDS
several of them to run properly, even though they may not appear to be critical
by their description. Someone else may be able to provide a link to a site that
recommends Windows services for shutdown (e.g., Messenger); I don't have one
handy.


For the Registry -- DON'T DO THIS UNLESS YOU UNDERSTAND THE REGISTRY -- run
regedt32 and search for "CurrentVersion\Run" or "run" in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER
(HKCU) and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (HKLM) hives. You will likely find several
programs listed under the \Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run keys.
Export the keys before deleting the data, so you can restore them if needed.

After the export, delete the suspect data lines and reboot. Note that some
drivers may be loaded this way, especially for laptops and their proprietary
monitor/keyboard/mouse drivers, so be careful
 
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