i turn em all off until i get the error message "crital system process". woks fine for me.

Here are some links. A lot of it is redundant, but may explain things differently for a better understanding. If you don't use that computer for networking or Internet, a whole LOT of stuff can be disabled or set to manual, but you'll have to re-enable stuff for Internet-downloaded updates for Windows and programs.

There's a LOT more than just disabling stuff that you need to consider. You need to read your manuals carefully, and research what they are talking about with settings in the Sonar AND in the soundcard/interface that interact with each other and may improve performance.

You also need to undersatnd just how much horsepower your computer is capable of. (You didn't list specs, so...) No amount of tweaking is going to make a computer with too little, or cheap "Value RAM" work much better. Same with CPU, what and how your drives are set up as, all the other background "programs" you have running...just a whole lot of stuff.

I spent a month or more tweaking and experimenting before I settled on a system that did WAY more than I knew I was going to use. I figured it would give me plenty of overhead and more stability. It was worth the time because I know now that I can just fire the thing up, and record and mix pretty much trouble-free, where before I'd run low on resources, get noises, or even crash or lock up. I was going so far as experimenting with the cluster sizing of the audio drives.

http://www.musicxp.net/

http://www.tweakxp.com/performance_tweaks.aspx

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/OptimizeXP.html

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Mar02/articles/pcmusician0302.asp

Good luck,

Kapt.Krunch