Personally I have only 15 processes at startup (XP Home).I shut most of the services down as most of em are useless,save for alg.exe which must be enabled for the inbuilt firewall in XP,which I actually
do use as I have no 3rd party firewall/or virus scanner.I also use system restore to replicate a virus scanner,I can roll back
. Then turn it all of for games playing.
My system is a P4 at 3Ghz,4GB RAM,ATI X800 Pro (256MB).It is an old system now from when I built it by today's standard,but still works great for most games today,albeit I am not able to run games like Splinter Cell Double Agent due to a lack of shaders 3.0,and other games from about 2008 onwards.This is understandable.
Think we may be going off topic a bit here