Process Overload

I am completely sick of all of the processes that have to be constantly running on my Windows machines. The things that particularly annoy me are the "update check" software- I am looking at you menacingly iTunes, Java, Adobe and Windows Update. Why on earth do these programs have to run constantly? Can't they at least just have a scheduled task to run at a particular time? Or how about copying firefox and just checking for an update whenever I start your program. I think Quicktime asks for updates more often that I actually use the software. I don't need a background process running constantly to tell me a piece of software that I haven't run in two months needs to be updated.

Perhaps even more annoying are the "helpers" that run to make various software applications appear to start up faster. I suppose this is just keeping up with the various tricks that Microsoft employs to make their stuff startup faster, so it's fair to blame them for starting the arms race.

And the final annoyance is the difficulty in seeing which svchost.exe PID goes with which service. How hard could it be record the name of the service, so that I could in a glance see which one is sucking CPU or RAM? I suppose I could actually code a solution to that myself...but I shouldn't have to. In fact, someone already did:

Process Explorer- this is what task manager should have been...