Killing processes that are normally running, is it "cheating"?

[SilverWS602]

Might be a dumb question, but when I run benchmarking programs, such as PT. I bring up task manager and still killing away. everything from explorer.exe to dwm.exe, anything I don't NEED gets killed.

I bumped my score (mainly through the 3dmark score from what I've seen) about 40 points doing this. Right now I'm sitting at 1339.5 (that 1340 is eluding me!).

Personally I see nothing wrong with this, and will continue to do this when I test my system. Just wanted other opinions.

[David (PassMark)]

It is kind of dangerous doing this as 1) novice users don't know what is save to kill and 2) the process you kill might be in the middle of something important, like updating the FAT of the disk.

Plus a lot of real background activity gets done by services, not by the applications that you can kill from task manager.

From a benchmarking point of view you should try and minimize background activity. But you don't want to go so far as to cripple the machine while doing it.

[SilverWS602]

Well I'm far from a novice user, I do computer repair for a living.

I kill processes and services. I know what to kill and what to leave. For example I don't touch the 80k svchost.exe file haha. I can usually get my memory usage from ~30% to ~18-20% after I kill the stuff. I reboot and away I go back to normal usage again.

Certainly, I don't recommend it for the standard user who doesn't know what the files/services are.