increasing speed

[CoffeeGuy]

I heard that the more programs you have running in the back ground, the more strain you put on the speed of the pc. Or something like that. This may be common knowledge to most, but I am very computer illiterate.
The programs I have running, I believe are those little icons at the bottom right hand corner of my monitor. What I want to do is have only a few running. All others, I will get as I need them. Does this question make sense ? How do I remove the ones Iwant there, and keep them off ?
(OS - XP)

[luvvbuzz]

yeah i know what you mean, i only have zone alarm, explorer and avg anti virus running in my system tray (the icons on bottom right of screen) i am running windows me at the moment and i just went to start->then Run-> type msconfig and enter-> the click the start up tab-> this shows you all the programs which load on start up and you can select which ones you dont want to automaticly start up.

[redwudz]

With XP, right click on the taskbar and select Task Manager. Unless you have a very slow system, I wouldn't worry about what is running unless you haven't closed a bunch of programs before you do something CPU intensive. Just because they are showing on the screen doesn't mean they are doing anything. Usually the programs running in the background don't use that much CPU cycles. You can find out by clicking the performance tab in Task Manager. It will tell you how much the CPU is being used.

[808smokey]

Do this:

Start - run - type "msconfig" click ok - go to start up tab (on right) then turn off the all the programs you don't need. Same with services tab, there's lots of things that you don't need. Like wireless Zero, auto update etc... You can relieve processor and memory usage through this faorly easily.

[gonzo90017]

There is an easier way. There's a freeware program called Autoruns. It's a freeware program that shows you what programs run at startup. It's pretty easy to use. You just highlight the icon you don't want at startup and click on the X to delete it. Just do a Google search. Hope this helps.