Bloated Laptop -- Help Me Figure Out which of 67 Processes Can Go.

[WhipperSnapper]

I have a Compaq Laptop with a Turion dual core (2.0 Ghz per core or thereabouts) and 4 GB DDR2 RAM. Lately I've been playing the single-threaded game Sins of a Solar Empire on the laptop and the performance is worse than on a rig with a single core Sempron at 2.2 Ghz and 2 GB RAM. The big difference? The Sempron rig only has 33 other processes running at one time. The laptop has about 66. I normally lock the game to Core 2 and set other programs to Core 1, but I'd still like to close lots of those other programs.

Do laptops normally have more processes running? The Sempron rig is Win XP and the laptop has Vista. (My gaming rig is a dual core Opteron 185 overclocked to 2.8 Ghz with 2 GB of RAM, no problems with that.)

Here is a list of the processes that are running:

Owner:
WiFiMsg.exe
HpqToasxter.exe
SynTPEnh.exe
explorer.exe
AVGIDSMonitor.exe
QPService.exe
QLBCTRL.exe
hpwuSchd2.exe
HPWAMain.exe
avgtray.exe
SynTPHelper.exe
dwm.exe
taskeng.exe

Local Service
svchost.exe (5 instances of this as Local Service !!!)
audiodg.exe

Network Service
svchost.exe (3 instances as Network Service)
SLsvc.exe

System
System Idle Process
System
pythonservice.exe (???)
smss.exe
avgchsvx.exe
csrss.exe (2 instances)
LSSrvc.exe
wininit.exe
services.exe
lsass.exe
lsm.exe
BLService.exe
winlogon.exe
svchost.exe (5 instances)
nvvsvc.exe (2 instances)
HPHC_Service.exe
MDM.EXE
wlanext.exe
spoolsv.exe
RichVideo.exe
SearchIndexer.exe
XAudio.exe
AVGIDSAgent.exe
avgnsx.exe
avgemcx.exe
taskeng.exe
WmiPrvSE.exe
Com4QLBEx.exe
hpqwmiex.exe
avgrsx.exe
avgcsrvx.exe

 

[lxskllr]

I'd get rid of AVG. Try Avira, or MSE. You'll have to look at the HP and Compaq processes yourself. See what they do, and maybe stop them from starting, or uninstall them altogether. Technically you shouldn't need much more than comes with vanilla Windows, but sometimes the addons are useful. You'll have to be the judge.

Edit:
grammar that changed the meaning of what I was saying.