I have found that my computer response is sluggish and at times hangs up. I have tried task manager to see what processes are running and I realised that I did not have a clue as to what the basic list of processes are found Vista to run properly. I have 73 processes running and I have not started to do anything as yet. Is the norm, how many are necessary and which ones are they?

Please help me.

Can't say which ones are necessary, but I just checked mine and I'm running 54 processes with only IE7 open and 3 optional system tray programs. This includes the option to "show processes from all users".

annlouire,

Please open TaskManager when you feel your PC is sluggish, as this should help you identify which processes are the memory hogs. Look for the usual suspects in Vista such as Indexing, DWM (Aero), maybe Outlook and maybe your Internet Security Suite (I assume you have something).

While Vista certainly uses more processes than XP, 73 seems a bit high. I'll guess it's a fairly new PC with lots of trialware installed thats making up for 10-20 of your running processes.

Disabling processes is a slippery slope if you've never done it before. While usually not fatal, turning off the wrong one can lead to crashes, inability to connect, and other hassles.

If you so choose, you can read this primer: http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/servicecfg.htm but PLEASE follow his rule of disabling processes one at a time (and then reboot) so you can easily remember what to re-enable if things fail.

Feel free to post back or search for a specific process that you are unsure of that isn't covered on his site.

A handy thing is to open the task manager and view the processes, but organize them descending by CPU usage. If you have hangs, you may see one or two processes frequently popping up to the top and then back down.