Laptop has too many processes running(70), help?

[Slick Rick]

My HP laptop's just generally slow and doesnt run smoothly. My friend has a slower laptop (on paper) than mine but it runs soo much smoother and quicker. Im running Vista and have 65-70 processes running most of the time. I know this should be a lot less but how do I know what to stop and how to stop the processes and prevent them appearing again safely?
I have 14 svchost. exe processes running, is that normal?
Also since I bought the laptop new Ive noticed the cpu usage rarely goes below 30%.

Ive updated AVG and Windows Defender and scanned, the computers clean so dont think its a virus or spyware as its been running like this from new.

Can anyone help?

 

[Philly]

You could just have a lot of stuff running on it. I have 80+ at one time and did a re-install of windows. That seems to have helped. Vista is a tank, though.

Also, consider upgrading to 7. If you're a student, you can pick it up for only 30 Pounds. It's quite a bit quicker though.

 

[Mark T]

Have a look at the amount of memory that certain applications are using. For example, I have around 40 processes running, most of them using between 10-20k of memory. However I have a folding @ home application which uses 122k. You might find that some do not need to be running all the time (Steam, F@H, Firewalls, anti virus etc).

If you're unsure of what a certain process is just type into Google and you nornally find a related topic.

 

[Tornado]

Try this.
About a year ago, I was able to cut down my services at idle for my (at that point 5-year-old) Windows XP installation from the mid-70s to high 30s/low 40s using one of his lists (I did a combination of "Safe" and "Power User"), which freed up about 200 MB of RAM and 15% of CPU.

 

[Slick Rick]

Thanks, ill have a look.