Need help getting rid of new laptop's processes!

Today I just recieved my wonderful dv5t Hp Pavillion notebook with Vista 32-bit home premium. I love it to pieces, however I have over 75+ processes running. I doubt that this is just vista (i'm an xp user), but 75 or more just seems like a lot to me.

I was just wondering what I can disable to get it down to under 50 with all the hp stuff. A lot of these processes that I've never seen before (because I used xp) so I'm unsure if I need them or not.
I've already disabled the sidebar since I don't use it.

Note: I am very computer literate (built my own pc and have configured it to perform!)

thanks to anyone that will help!

Have you gone into msconfig and edited your startup list?

Vista does tend to do quite a bit in the background, although that should settle out after a while (the initial stuff Vista does on a new machine involves a ton of hard drive activity). 70+ processes still sounds like a lot to me - my laptop has 67, and it's fairly cluttered (not horrendously though, and it performs fine). The main thing is performance of course, so if you're happy with that, everything should be fine.

http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/servicecfg.htm

That sounds about right - early on, a combination of updates, search indexing, and various other background tasks makes for a very large quantity of hard drive accesses, but later on, those should tend to die off.

Yeah, i should backup my system. I think I'll create my system recovery dvd's that my hp allows me to create. I didn't get any backup discs with the system, but supposedly this 'hp recovery' whatever would let me re-create my laptop.
If I lose some programs that I just installed, that's no biggie. I have most of my important data already backed up just in case (i've had that issue sometime in the past).

Thanks again for all of the help!

Ok. I'm on my second week on this thing and I am loving it to pieces!
However, I have found that my touch/mute button light does not change color when I mute or unmute my laptop. It functions properly, however i was wondering if anyone can shed some light as to how I can restore the physical function.

I'll try to find some decent pictures if anyone needs to see what I'm talking about.

Thanks!