Easy for you to say, you know wth stuff is!
I keep a close eye on the Task Manager but still have no idea what 95% of those programs are.
A while back I noticed the laptop was getting sluggish and Adobe Flash was lingering in the TM even after closing the page it was called up for.
That got me in the habit of watching the TM. I generally see 20 or so background processes and 25 or so Windows processes, including a whole heap of "Service Host" processes. I googled some of these things looking to learn what I could do without, but it's difficult for someone whose specialty is Byzantine history.
Still, I did find that making Adobe Flash a permission-needed program, cured a lot of misery. Just say no!
My task manager, when I’m not running any programs, shows six running processes, two of which are the task manager itself and its UI.
The rest are system processes that must always be running: crsss.exe, winlogon.exe, dwm.exe, and explorer.exe.
Most people don’t have my skills so they’ll need an anti-virus running (I eschew them personally but I have other methods of staying virus-free), so that would be seven, maybe eight if there are two processes for the AV.
Anything more than that is something that probably shouldn’t be running unless you are using it.
I have occasional problem with my browser freezing. Turns out it is the Shockwave plugin crashing. Win7 64 Ultimate here.