Strange Background Processes

[iStewbert]

Well, I opened up my trusty dashboard this morning, took a gander at islayer, and noticed that I had some weird @$$ processes running. I should first say that I intentionally opened up islayer to see what was running because my computer has been lagging in speed. Here's whats running,

cupsd
Syncserver
mdworker
systemUIS...
sh
ps
windowsserver
makewhatis
login.code
config.d

Alright, lets put it this way. I use my computer preeetty much for surfing the net, don't have much downloaded on it, and i've never heard of these things. I've been in system preferences and checked to see what the start up processes are (there are none). Can someone tell me why these programs would be running all of the sudden? How can turn them off, why would they be running, they never have before? Im hoping its not a virus. Thanks for help, suggestions, clarification, or simply letting me know i'm a no0b!

 

[Cave Man]

Those are all system tasks to keep things running. If you kill them, you could have lots of troubles (e.g., windowserver). For example, mdworker is your indexing app so that your Finder searches are fast.

 

[iStewbert]

Cool, I continued to do research on this...It's all just normal. Preciate the info though! I will keep trying to figure out why my macbook has slowed down so much recently.

 

[Cave Man]

Mdworker is notorious for slowing things down. Just let it run until it's completely indexed your hard drive (time-consuming the first time), then things should improve.

 

[Aranince]

cupsd is your printer server/drivers