disable background programs
 

I did a search on background programs and didn't come up with much. Can anyone shed some light on this subject. I know that video editing is very processor intensive. I know it is suggested to disable antivirus and firewall. What other programs would you suggest?

Review blackviper.com, and while not all agree, I like the simple guidance at Videoguys.com (WinXP Tweaks).

Check for programs installed by your printers/scanners. Both my HP7960 and my Lexmark printers installed programs that run at start up. I have taken to a practice of installing all periphals not needed for video editing to another computer.

In XP, use run-->msconfig to disable:

distributed computing apps if you have a hyperthreading processor (2 processors will show up in task manager)

realshec and qttask. These belong to Real Player and Quicktime. Getting rid of these may increase performance a few neglible percent.

Your anti-virus' real-time scanning "feature".

Not sure if you need to get rid of firewall.

If you are running low on RAM, lowering the # of running programs and processes will help. But I'd get more RAM instead.

Any adware or spyware.

Any processes that show up as taking 1% or more CPU under task manager. Of course, be careful what you're removing.

Services to get rid of (through services.msc):

messenger service - This lets people spam you. If you have a firewall, this will not be a problem. You should have a firewall anyways, although you can get away with not running one and disabling this and keeping updated.

file indexing

*maybe* system restore. Sometimes this feature is helpful for installations gone wrong.

Everything else doesn't really do much. I haven't been able to measure any difference between the other services on or off.

IMO the tweaks above are all that you really need to care about. The other ones make no measurable difference. Other "tweaks" that work:

1- For running Vegas, you can get a very very small performance increase by setting the vegas process to real-time priority.

2- Overclocking your CPU. You have to know what you're doing.

3- Checking your hard drives are in DMA mode. Do this in device manager, look at your IDE controllers, click on the second tab under properties, and look at the transfer mode.

Thanks for the replys, I will check it all out. Some of the stuff listed I am not sure of. Nero incd seems to be on the list of thing running .I guess that would be one of those to disable.