I have a Gateway 3310 with Windows XP home with 512 megs of RAM. It's still running a bit sluggish. And when I run certain programs that ran okay in my old computer that had a lot less RAM here the program occassionaly freezes, the computer was running at 100%, and I have to reboot as a result. So I rebooted just now and looked at all of the processes that were running and this is what I found.

Total processes: 29

taskmgr.exe
GoogleToolbarNotifier.exe
ctfmon.exe
spoolsv.exe
alg.exe
jusched.exe
ashDisp.exe
ashMaiSv.exe
zHotkey.exe
hkcmd.exe
igfxtray.exe
shwiconEM.exe
explorer.exe
ashServ.exe
PRISMXL.SYS
aswUpdSv.exe
svchost.exe
svchost.exe
svchost.exe
svchost.exe
svchost.exe
lsass.exe
services.exe
winlogon.exe
csrss.exe
smss.exe
ashWebSv.exe
System
System Idle Process

Now I know for a fact that I do not need all of these processes running when I start up the computer. So which of these processes can I safely disable?

go to start/run,type in msconfig ,and startup and remove the one you don't need from there ,not the task manger ..
good site to help ,in the last paragraph is a link to a startup site ,just search the .exe of a program from msconfig to see if its safe to disable .
http://www.netsquirrel.com/msconfig/msconfig_xp.html

You'll likely only be able to turn off 5 or 6 processes and that will save you some ram but not as much as turning off programs that startup each time you boot.

I suggest using msconfig from Start Run and then going through your startup programs. Some of them can be quite large and eat lots of RAM.

You need to upgrade your RAM. 512MB is a minimum that XP should be operated on. If you upgrade to 1 or 2 GB your performance should improve.