Activity monitor - what are all these processes and how do i stop them?

hi.
i have a laptop that i use completely for live music performance and i want to disable everything on the mac that could be taking up RAM and CPU power.
i firstly notice airport base station agent and spotlight. can i disable these?
i also notice itunes helper... whats that?
i also have lots of others such as - ATSServer, launchd, loginwindow, mdworker, pboard, syncserver, systemUIServer and UserEventAgent... what are these and do i need them running?
many thanks....

hi.
thanks for coming back with an answer so quickly.
in activity monitor i can see spotlight is taking up about 25mb.
i have a 6GB music session to run with a huge CPU load so every bit of my 4GB RAM is taken up.
i do use spotlight a lot but could do without if it meant freeing up a little bit of space... it all helps!
i can see no page outs and it says 0 bytes but even though im running nothing on my computer i only have 3.3GB of my 4 available. 260MB is active and 420MB is wired.
im sure ableton live (my live music app) would appreciate even a little bit more RAM...
i know the maximum RAM my mac can have is 4GB but i think thats the limit for the application anyway so buying a new mac and more RAM wouldnt help i dont think....
any ideas?

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