I'm a newbie and I just installed Mandrake 8.2 on an old laptop. Since its an old
laptop, I want to be running as few processes and services as possible. So which
one of these services can I safely disable?:

1. anacron
2. apmd
3. atd
4. autofs
5. crond
6. devfsd
7. gpm
8. harddrake
9. internet
10. irda
11. keytable
12. kheader
13. kudzu
14. linuxconf
15. netfs
16. network
17. nfs
18. nfslock
19. pcmcia
20. portmap
21. sound
22. syslog
23. usb
24. xfs
25. xinetd

I know that some of these, like sound, syslog, xfs, etc. are very important and need
to be running, but I thought I would list them all to keep it simple. Which ones
can I disable for now? Thanks in advance.

kudzu, is for checking if you have put new hardware in your machine, you can safely disable this (only enable it when you put new hardware in)

USb, if you don´t have any usb devices attached you can also disable that.

IRDA, if you don´t have an infrared port or you don´t use it, disable it.

If you are not hooked up with another linux system, then you can also disable: nfs & nfslock.
If you don´t have any pcmcia devices, also kill that

you could nuke gpm aswell i guess (console mouse services) things like kudzu don't run as a daemon tho, so disabling that will only affect the boot time, not the running performance.

and of course completely uninstall linuxconf.

You can also disable harddrake. It's nearly the same as kudzu.

you can disable portmap (I guess there is no need for you to run remote procedure calls), irda is another candidate if there is no infrared devices attached to your system (mouse, keyboard), anacron and crond you can leave either one but there is no need to run them both, if you want to share files via NFS you must leave nfs and nfslock otherwise there is no need for them as well as autofs and netfs, does the laptop have a USB interface? If the answer is no why then you need usb running. Internet? I am not sure what it does, so you might leave it if won't hurt.

i prefer to disable all the services. but it you use GUI enable xfs. also lpd can be enabled if you use printers.

Thanks to everyone. I cut out about 15 processes, but I also learned what some of these processes do too, which is cool.

Whats your boot up time?

(from the pushing of the power button to login screen)

Please state X or console Im curious as to how slow my system is to yours. :\ gotta take some time out and work on that. been to busy tho

ALSO

you might want to look into recompiling your kernel to increase over all speed and security. It will greatly improve stability and bootup and realt-time useage timing.

I haven't done this yet myself but I will. Still have to figure out whats all involved. This is what I plan to learn tomorrow.

My system (runlevel 3) is bootling in 18 seconds. Most of the time takes POST, so I can't make it much faster. But I think that everyone can do below 30 sec (with X 45 sec, not more).