More about background tasks.

Posted on 24 October 2006, Last updated on 30 October 2014 by

Last week I was shocked to see the ASUS R2H loaded with over 70 processes all competing for CPU, bus, memory and disk access. My 500Mhz VEGA was faster than the 900Mhz R2H. Really. With heavyweight operating systems on low-powered devices, the manufacturers must take responsibility for producing a clean image and not loading it up with crap that simply reduces the quality of the customer experience.

Ctitanic/Frank has found another background process that’s affecting usability. Its the Vista indexing processes.

Much like anti-virus programs, this will be sitting around doing nothing but looking at all your files taking a chunk of your valuable resources away. (Does anyone have any preferences or tips on efficient Anti Virus programs. My favorite for efficiency is Mcafee. My least favorite is Kaspersky.)

Here’s Franks take on it.

Next week I have an appointment with an R2H owner to try and sort out the mess on his device. If anyone else if having problems with a slow ASUS R2H, let me know what you’ve done to try and rectify the problem and we’ll put a post together for all the R2H owners that are wondering why things arent running as expected.

Regards

Steve /Chippy

Technorati tags: r2h, umpc, tips

4 Comments For This Post

  1. cinOxen says:

    NOD32 is highly rated and good on resources

  2. Andy says:

    Hi Steve

    You said that you’d optimised your machine to reduce the number of processes running. Any chance that you could make a bit of a tutorial explaining how you do that? Perhaps your list of essential processes? My Q1 has over 70 running and I hardly know where to begin in trimming that down.

    Thanks

  3. Chippy says:

    Out of the box, the i7210 was pretty clean.

    As I said in the post, i’m going to try to get something together about making the R2H more efficient. I’m no Windows uber-expert (more hardware and Linux i’m afraid) but I have a good idea of where to start.

    Programs like Spybot and Nod32 will help.

    Regards
    Steve.

  4. Anonymous says:

    I’ve lowered my processes down to 47 by turning off several unused programs. (login keyboardsurrogate, icmsvr.exe, dialkey and others.) The basic commit of hard drive resources is 300mb and the cpu usage is down to 2% with an unloaded machine. I am running AVG free in the low resource mode which uses 1.5mb total.

    Jay

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