New Dell laptop. Need advice on set up

[fourpin]

I need help optimizing my new Dell 9400 (thanks 2+2'ers for pointing me towards this huge display)

It is taking forever to boot up.
I have gone through the Add/Remove programs to delete AOL and Earthlink and other programs I will never use, but it still seems slow. When I check task manager it shows 75 running processes(that seems alot compared to my desktops 36 processes). I seem to remember posts talking about alot of Dell specific junk that can be removed. Can you point my towards a resource or link that helps me get started?

I know someone has answered similar questions before, but the searches I have tried, yielded no results. Thank you in advance for your assistance.

The computer in question is a Dell 9400 duo core proc, 1GB ram and XP media edition. It was purchased as a "refurbished" machine from the Dell outlet.
Please let me know if you need more info to answer my questions.

[SamIAm]

If you really want to get into it (and it sounds like you do [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]) then you can google each process name and figure-out what it does. Then go into MSConfig and turn it on or off at startup.
-Sam