KILL LIST: Apps, Tasks, Services
 

I finally downloaded and installed TaskPower, by PC Magazine.

Looking over the list of running apps, tasks and services, and needing to sort out what's essential and what's not, it feels a bit daunting.

Anyone come across a list of tasks that just eat up CPU cycles and can be safely killed for Vegas and DVDA work?

I haven't found a need to stop anything. Of course my editing PC also does not have a ton of things installed (i.e. anti-virus and other programs that continually run in the background).

Some people use a program called "End it all".

I got the followiong info from the Sony site some time ago.


Close all background applications. This is not limited to the
programs that show in the system tray. Do a ctrl+alt+del and end
task or process on as many applications as you can, leaving only
Explorer and Systray for 98 or ME. For Windows 2000 and XP
move over to the Processes Tab and click the "Image Name"
heading at the top of this window twice, you would be able to view
these items by alphabetical order. For Windows 2000, you should
only have:

explorer.exe
lsass.exe
mapisp32.exe
mstask.exe
services.exe
smss.exe
spoolsv.exe
stisvc.exe
svchost.exe
system
system idle process
taskmgr.exe
winlogon.exe
winmgmt.exe

For Windows XP, you will only need next to your user name:

explorer.exe
taskmgr.exe

Next to "system":
csrss.exe
lsass.exe
mspmspv.exe
services.exe
smss.exe
spoolsv.exe
svchost.exe
system
system idle process
winlogon.exe

about 15 service are running in a "clean" windows.
press CTR-ALT-DEL, select task manager, select the process tab.
at bottom you got the total of services running.
the cleaner your machine, the faster.
i got an old P4 2.8Ghz running perfectly well with HD editing.

I will routinely run EndItAll before editing sessions. May not close everything but seems to do a good job. Never have had a problem.

In my tests, most things don't make a big difference.

What does make a difference are:
A- Distributed computing applications like Prime95, F@H.
B- Anti-virus.

Other than that it's not a huge deal. You could benchmark your system with rendertest.veg to see if changing things make a difference. Stopping the two things above are the only things that made a measurable difference in my tests.

2- In Windows Task Manager, changing Vegas' priority to real-time will increase performance by a whopping 1%.