How many processes are supposed to be running on my HP Pavillion Laptop, duo 2.2Ghz processors? What are 'csrss.exe' and 'mmc.exe' when they have no description? I have 88 processes running at the most, 84 at the least. When I got it, 65 was the average.
by 
Annon
ANSWERS: 5
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You should be able to check yourself. Right click MY COMPUTER and go to Properties. The # and speed of processors should appears. Those are names of windows files. DO NOT delete them.
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All those processes are usually things that your computer uses to funtion. Anything you have open is going to add a process. MSN, yahoo, aim messengers if you have them will create a process. Often times sound, video, or networking have their own seperate processes. All that stuff on the taskbar in the lower-right part of your screen has it's own process and there are many more you can't actually see visually. The longer you have your computer and install more applications the number will almost for sure go up. Other applications that install processes even when they aren't running are Adobe Reader, iTunes, or antivirus software(hopefully you have antivirus).
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You can usually google things like application names to find out what they are, too. For the next time you have mystery applications. :)
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you have two processor cores(full cores not hyperthread) on a single chip. Those exe files are required for windows to run properly. I also do not recommend changing the processor affinity, I'd let the processor/windoze handle that. bear in mind, there are not very many programs that are coded for muliprocessing, symmetric multiprocessing. diffrent things work better with the dual core, esp with pre-hyperthreading era software. I have 4 intel xeon quadcores, I use only 1 chip total.
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There's no way to answer 'how many processes are supposed to be running?'. The number of processes you'll find running at any time depends on what software is installed on your computer, what programs are open on your computer and what software is being loaded automatically when Windows starts. You have control over all three, but few people know about controlling the latter. You are very right to be curious about what processes are running on your PC. The best thing to do is Google each process to learn about what they are and whether it's OK to get rid of them. Don't take one site's word for anything - sometimes sites call a process bad when it really isn't. Get corroborating evidence. Once you've learned the purpose of each process, I recommend writing them down - you'll never remember what they all do even if you check again in a week. In many cases, the ones that are optional can be gotten rid of by modifying what programs start with Windows by using a utility like Autoruns.
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