How to reduce Windows 10 processes

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How to reduce Windows 10 processes
I have about 95 Windows processes shown in Task manager and I only open Chrome. Most of them are Service host processes.
I have tried several tips to reduce background processes and turned of several presentation features.
RAM is 70% consumed out of 4GB.
I use this computer for software development with VSCode and recently upgraded a few days ago from windows 8.1
Is there anything I can do?

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You wouldn’t have to worry about it if you could add more RAM.

4GB seems quite underpowered for software development to me.

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For Windows 10 I would recommend 16GB of RAM. 8GB is the minimum.
You can use BlackViper’s recommended Windows 10 Service Configurations (not for the faint of heart)
Make a full image backup before making any changes.

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windbg

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You can reduce the amount of RAM and make your PC “feel” more responsive by replacing the pre-installed Windows Defender as your Antivirus tool by installing a more lightweight AV.

When I tried W10 on my old 32 bit laptop which is limited to ~3GB RAM by design, installing Panda reduced RAM usage by a significant amount (I no longer have the percentage number) and the PC felt almost usable again (it normally runs W7 – still very usable).

The AV-Comparatives test house compare the performance impact of AVs as part of their testing – see https://www.av-comparatives.org/comparison/ . If you look at their latest (at time of writing) April 2021 “performance test” results (I suggest select “by vendor”) you can see Panda had least impact, “Microsoft” (presumably Defender) the most.

Note: “Microsoft” is normally bottom or close to bottom in terms of protection as well. While finding the above link I noticed “Microsoft” was not included at all in the latest Feb-May 2021 results, but was bottom in the previous Feb-Mar 2021 results.

Just a thought.

 

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I forgot to add this above 🙂

Taking a step back, if the PC previously had W8.1 which still has another 18 months to 2 years (or more) of useful life left in it, why did you downgrade to W10 now?

If you have a recent W8.1 backup, you could always restore it.

I consider myself very fortunate that I have W8.1 licenses for my 2 main PCs (desktop & laptop) and I don’t intend downgrading to W10 until I cannot avoid it (and I may change to Linux at that time).

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Microsoft has done a lot of work to unbundle service host processes. In prior versions of Windows, many of the individual processes were bundled under one service host instance. Unbundling these processes has made Windows more stable. If there is a problem in one of the processes it does not require several others to be shut down or restarted to recover from the problem.

I would not worry about the RAM usage unless you are having performance problems. RAM is there to be used. Windows does a pretty good job of managing RAM. If you have real measurable performance problems look into adding RAM to the machine. You did not say what type of system you have but if it is a notebook adding RAM may not be possible.

--Joe

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wavy

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overclocking definitely will help for streaming. Well, that, and turning off Windows 10 Game DVR.

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I had a lot of trouble running with 4GB. Once I updated to 8GB, those problems went away. Browsers take a lot of memory at 4GB, so I would have to exit the browser to do something else.

While I gave my security suite a free pass, Search took up too much memory & CPU, so I nuked that subsystem. In addition, Windows Update services only run when I allow them to run. I also nuked Cortina and OneDrive. Running Process Explorer and looking at installed Apps gave me ideas to uninstall some apps that Microsoft automatically includes that I clearly don’t use.  I run Process Explorer all the time. I sort the process list by memory or CPU usage.

Before making your system non-standard or running Windows Update or installing vendor drivers, back it up incrementally or better, take an image backup.

Windows 10 22H2 desktops & laptops on Dell, HP, ASUS; No servers, no domain.

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TaskForce141

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anonymous wrote:

Is there anything I can do?

You could not worry about it.
As Joe said, unless you have performance problems you don’t need to do anything.

If you need more performance there are 2 things that make Windows much faster:
An SSD
More RAM

cheers, Paul

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