How many programs are supposed to be running, max at startup" I read in a tech report somewhere that there should be between 15 and 75. I have 98. I think it may be effecting my CPU which sometimes runs at 98%. How do I find out which of the files I can close? Or, could it be that one application is slowing my system down? I have McAffee, Spybot, AdAware and Norton all on my computer. Is that bad?1 person got this answerI do too

Numbers like that are meaningless. There is no "max," and there is no"should." Despite what many people tell you, you should be concerned, not withhow *many* of these programs you run, but *which*. Some of them can hurt performance severely, but others have no effect on performance. Don't just stop programs from running willy-nilly. What you should dois determine what each program is, what its value is to you, and what the cost in performance is of its running all the time. You can getmore information about these at http://www.processlibrary.com/. If you can't find it there, try searches and ask about specifics here.Once you have that information, you can make an intelligent informed decision about what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of.But are you talking about programs or processes? 98 is an enormousnumber if you're talking about programs. But even for processes, there is no max. Another community answer from the Windows XP newsgroups

Quote: I have McAffee, Spybot, AdAware and Norton all on my computer. Is that bad? If the "McAfee" and "Norton" products you mention are both "antivirus" products, then your answer is "YES"...that is very bad. Both of those products also offer other features in addition to their antivirus scans which is why I asked. However, if you have both Norton and McAfee antivirus products running on your computer, that alone would cause a serious issue with performance. In addition, you actually reduce your level of protection running more than one antivirus product on board. The reason for this is because both will want to argue over territorial rights and demand access to any offending file found on the system. This wrestling match causes system instability and can ultimately cause the system to crash. In that scenario, the possibility is very real for losing data. It is best to decide which of those to keep, and uninstall the other. As to the other processes running on the computer, you can research each of them easily enough. "Bill Studios" has written an excellent piece of software that he named "WinPatrol". There is a free version available Here . The program will offer an explanation of each running process so you can decide for yourself if you can safely remove it from the startup menu.