I'm on Windows 7, but a lot of things would apply to any system, it just that the system related stuff you may have to find out for yourself where it is. Some posted recently and I saw they had Picassa, that's a lovely one it will index every picture on your harddrive even thumbnails and pictures in cache and temporary files. I got rid of that. Now for the things I had to take care of on this system. '''Windows 7''' Home Premium<br>Ghostwriters, scheduled tasks ☷☷☷☷ *http://dmcritchie.mvps.org/windows-7/win7.htm#ghosts The first part are allowed scheduled task, you need to know when then occur, after that is Windows indexing -- turn if off it is one of the worst offenders, it faster to just search your drives and searching has less impact on your system than useless indexing, and then some things in '''Firefox''' (article header says it may be out of date -- unlikely though '''Firefox things''' to turn off media indexing, page refresh. :http://dmcritchie.mvps.org/firefox/firefox-problems.htm#autoplay '''media.autoplay.enabled''' user set Boolean set to false in about:config :'''browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs''' to 0 in about:config ''(sometimes set default of 3, which defeats whole purpose of seeting it to 0 as a replacement for the "bartab" extension)'' :(do not use the "Stop Autoplay" extension, which stops picture from showing) Looks like I'm not stopping autorefresh though, might be related to my expectations of any change on a local drive to cause an immediate refresh but can't find such an option to refresh only local drive. '''Problematic extensions''' :http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions Look carefully through the problematic extensions, avoid phone applications such as Skype which share your band width with other in order to function, only keep such applications up when needed. Do not install the Skype extension Avoid third party toolbars and extensions to tie into other running applications. Don't install timers in Firefox, as standalone application would be better.