If you run Vista home premium and have never taken the time to strip it down to its basics, or done any un-installing of the crap that some PC makers pre-install, you *might* be having stability or performance issues. Vista is NOT a horribly slow and bloated O/S, or at least not as bad as people claim, but it can easily get cluttered. If you run task manager (right click the bar at the bottom of the screen and select it) you should see something like this:
If your list of running processes is bigger than that, you are running stuff you do not need. You might run it anyway (I run msn and the sidebar normally) but most people have junk running that achieves nothing but instability. I don’t like itunes thinking it deserves a permenant position in my memory, same with quicktime, the BBC iPlayer etc.
I thought this might be helpful for people looking at a list of 34 processes, and thinking “These must be essential”. They aren’t :D