Hey Folks,

I just bought a new PC the other day and I have a few quick questions that I hope one of you could answer.

1) I have xp media center edition and in task manager I see:
about 49-51 processes after reboot
about a 240mb page file usage
idling between 1 & 6%
does all this sound normal ? (especially the pf usage with my specs [listed below])

2) Every once in a while I'll see my mouse kind of go from one side of the desktop to another, this is usually when opening a large folder or something. It doesn't happen very often at all. Any ideas on this?

I really appreciate anyone taking the time to read this and respond. Thanks so much guys.

3.0ghz P4 with Hyper Threading
1024 mb DDR 3200
128 DDR Radeon X300 Pci-Exp.
250 gig ATA Serial 7200rpm HDD
XP Media Center Edition

A more clear understanding of your processes and what is going on is found by using performance monitor. Perfmon may actually fool the test if you run it on the machine that you wish to test. It helps of you run it on another computer.

The only clean answer would have be either a baseline done at the initial install or purchase. Might even have to test other similar computers.

Might be some unknown bug in the new edition. Seems if forgets.

49-51 processes is way too many. You should be able to get it to the mid to high twenties by just cleaning up your start menu in the registry and msconfig

To find out what each Startup(or Process) item
does or means, and any recommendation as to if you should close the process:
Task List Programs

Go to Start, then Run, and type: msconfig
then press enter.

On the Startup tab, go through and uncheck anything unnecessary from your boot list. I only have about 5 things checked.
Also, you can check out the Services tab. Down at the bottom, check "Hide All Microsoft Services" and then sort through the above list. This helps a lot if you know what you're doing (or own Adobe licensed programs). For this, I only have 1 thing checked, which happens to be my internet device service.

To make your startup faster, you could also find all of the .exe files it launches and add "prefetch=1" to the end of their command lines.

Shuttle XPC SN95
AMD 3500+ @ 2.84 GHz Venice core
ATI Radeon X800 XT
1 GB Corsair XMS
240 GB Western Digital HDD

1. Yes its normal if you have few programs running/installed (some run in background even if not opened), not if its fresh Windows XP install with no software installed.

2. That's because mouse "stops" while you open something big. You end up moving mouse little, when the big thing has opened mouse starts working again and it appears to popup some somewhere else.

Joshua,
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