Today I had to restore a machine using my bare-bones XP image. A long time ago I did a clean install of XP and then created a Ghost image of that install. The install took almost an hour. The imaging process takes ten minutes. I haven’t installed XP from the disks in years even though I do a fresh image at least once a month.
One of the first things I noticed after the install was that Windows Messenger was automatically running. I don’t use Messenger. I also don’t recommend running programs all the time if you are not going to use them. Even though the program is running in the background it is taking up CPU cycles that can be used to make your active applications run faster.
Here is a Microsoft article that explains how to stop Messenger from loading automatically when Windows starts.
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