Background processes after driver installation - necessary or not?

[dnisus]

Hey everyone,

Newbie here. Just finished a build and installed windows 8. After installing chipset, LAN, USB 3.0, audio, and NVIDIA drivers, I found some startup applications and background processes that weren't there before. Can anyone tell me if any of these are unnecessary, and if so, how to disable them? Here's a couple of pictures: http://imgur.com/a/xTyD6

Secondly, my device manager is showing one unknown device, and I have no idea what it could be. I flipped through the motherboard manual (ASRock Z77 Extreme4) but couldn't find any drivers that may be missing. Does anyone know how I can find out what's missing?

Thanks in advance! I appreciate your time answering my inquiries.

 

[majestic1805]

As a rule of thumb anything running as part of a device driver I don't second guess. I disable obvious bloatware that clearly has nothing to do with the device but that's subjective given the driver software. Now, some things Windows handles okay on its own. Things like proprietary network managers are redundant to me so I disable those start up items. However, other things like the graphics card management applications like AMD's CCC need to be left intact. I keep the proprietary audio management application as they seem to be able to do better than Windows natively and often offer pretty granular control over the sound coming out of your speakers. I've never seen any proprietary apps for USB, though. Chipset is chipset: don't touch it unless it's obvious bloatware like bundled AOL or something.

 

[Hawkeye22]

The unkown device may be firewire or something. If it's enabled in the bios, you need to install a driver for it. If you don't plan on using a device, disable it in the bios (firewire, LPT,...) to prevent windows from seeing it and complaining about a missing driver.