Hello and first of all, thanks to all people that make maemo and N900 the best of both worlds: hardware and software.

I'd like to make my small contribution with an idea.

There should be a kind of applet for the control panel that allows to set startup options to the daemons or services that runs on maemo.

Maybe things like choppy audio and/or video playback could be resolved if those daemons could be temporary or permanently disabled.

Bluetooth, tracker, automatic updates, calendar, and many, many other daemons or services could be controlled this way, even to save battery when needed.

Thanks you all for reading this.

As far as I understand tracker does its thing when it's needed, so disabling it completely would break things. Automatic updates can be "disabled" either by using gconf or UpdateConfigurator (http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=75798, in extras-devel) if you want/need a GUI for that.

For the rest (bluetooth, calendar, etc.) I submit they don't use CPU in any detectable manner (when not in use), so disabling them would most likely not achieve anything (aside for the good feeling of keeping things clean and simple

Do you have any list of non-critical daemons that use CPU/battery?

My only gripe is with intellisyncd (Nokia Messaging), which sometimes runs amok if the N900 loses connectivity (walking away from a WLAN). I now kill it with an ifdown script (it is then restarted automatically, but behaving well).

In any case, the idea is good, even if perhaps not so useful in the end.

OK, I think the major grip in all of this is the intensive hard disk activity it seems to be always there.

Disabling all the non-critical stuff could be useful to test if it has something to do with the audio/video recording/playback issues everybody talks about.