Vista service guide... what can I turn off

[chronic9]

a co-worker told me about a awesome guide i think it was on lifehacker that told you which services were okay to turn off for a home vista system. well, it wasnt lifehacker, and i cant find this guide for the life of me on google....

[Version_3]

www.tweakguides.com

More directly:
http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html

[Mithent]

Mostly the changes they recommend are fairly innocuous, although they turn off a lot for being 'network' services, some of which may be desirable even on a home network. I'd be astonished if disabling them did anything for performance though.

[Arainach]

Just leave them alone.

[OldMX]

Just leave them alone.

Yep, its not worth the effort

[Joe Average]

Leave it alone.

'Nuff typed.

[calebb]

Leave it alone.

Upgrade to 2GB RAM if you didn't already.

Use your computer as usual for 2-3 days for SuperFetch to optimize the physical location of files on your disk & populate its cache.

[IcedEmotion]

Leave the services alone. If you really want to mess with something perhaps disable the windows defender scheduled scan, or at least change the time on it.

[Spherific]

I followed one of those guides once and it totally FUBARed my computer when I restarted

[xxEIEIOxx]

+1. Don't mess with it. You'll cause more problems than you solve. Pruning running processes was something for the days when memory was $50 a MB. Yes, I remember when a 4MB SIMM was $200.

[Torquemada XP]

Since he asked what he can turn off and not if he should or shouldn't...

The most well-known/infamous source is Blackviper (http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/servicecfg.htm).

Image your drive and go slowly and you'll find what works and doesn't work for your particular needs. I don't subscribe to the blanket hands-off approach taken by many folks in the OS forum, but be aware that there are several new Services introduced in Vista you simply shouldn't/can't disable.

[DeaconFrost]

It's been said over and over again, but Vista is not XP/2000/98, etc. Leave it alone, let it self-tune, and you'll be fine. Those tweak guides' methodologies don't really apply anymore since Vista was released. You most certainly won't pull out any more performance by following those guides. At the very best, you'll still have a stable system with absolutely no difference in performance. At the very worst, you'll be wiping the drive to reinstall.

[chronic9]

hmm, that guide is too long first of all. lol

i figured if i turned off some of the services that are aimed at corporate environment it would be speedier, but i guess not.

good to know that my 4gb of ram is useful for SOMETHING. lol

[InCogneato]

definitely recommend the Blackviper guide posted by Torquemada XP

[legendz411]

UAC!I keed, I keed

[Azhar]

You make it so easy for us to seem like we're on a crusade against you, InCogneato. BlackViper is the LAST site you want to go to for tweaks because they don't know what the hell they're talking about. I'm afraid you made a poor recommendation again mate. Stay away from BlackViper.

Leave Vista alone. Turn off UAC when you're setting your computer up, installing drivers, and all, but once you're finished, turn it back on. You'll shoot yourself in the foot leaving it off.

[DeaconFrost]

BlackViper is the LAST site you want to go to for tweaks because they don't know what the hell they're talking about.
He has been known as QuackViper for quite some time for a reason!

[Joe Average]

And people still say turn UAC off. Tsk, tsk, tsk... shame on you all. You should be reprimanded and scolded and forced to turn over your Johnny Geek cereal box badges... shame on you, shame!!!

[InCogneato]

You make it so easy for us to seem like we're on a crusade against you, InCogneato. BlackViper is the LAST site you want to go to for tweaks because they don't know what the hell they're talking about. I'm afraid you made a poor recommendation again mate. Stay away from BlackViper.

Leave Vista alone. Turn off UAC when you're setting your computer up, installing drivers, and all, but once you're finished, turn it back on. You'll shoot yourself in the foot leaving it off.

He has been known as QuackViper for quite some time for a reason!


:rolleyes: good grief, dare i ask what is wrong with the black viper list? there is a "safe" list, a "tweaked" list, and a "barebones" list, pick what you wish. go ahead and try to convince me that blackviper is somehow an idiot for saying its ok to disable the fax service or the windows media center services if you dont use these features.

you all are just a bunch of forum trolls desperate to make yourselves seem superior to everyone else and here you are persuading others that the way YOU use Vista is the best way. sorry, but i turn off UAC (not recommending this to others) and i turn off a ton of services including windows defender. if this guy wanted to remain at the default config like you are recommending, i sincerely doubt he would have made a thread specifically asking which services are ok to turn off.

im looking at your post histories and all i see you all putting down everyone for their suggestions and saying things like "lol why would anyone say that" "lolz i cant believe u would do that," and its the same little group backing each others pessimism up throughout many threads. i hope you all get banned because this is just ridiculous.

[koretex]

+1. Don't mess with it. You'll cause more problems than you solve. Pruning running processes was something for the days when memory was $50 a MB. Yes, I remember when a 4MB SIMM was $200.

I remember when 256k was $120 :)

[Azhar]

:rolleyes: good grief, dare i ask what is wrong with the black viper list? there is a "safe" list, a "tweaked" list, and a "barebones" list, pick what you wish. go ahead and try to convince me that blackviper is somehow an idiot for saying its ok to disable the fax service or the windows media center services if you dont use these features.

you all are just a bunch of forum trolls desperate to make yourselves seem superior to everyone else and here you are persuading others that the way YOU use Vista is the best way. sorry, but i turn off UAC (not recommending this to others) and i turn off a ton of services including windows defender. if this guy wanted to remain at the default config like you are recommending, i sincerely doubt he would have made a thread specifically asking which services are ok to turn off.

im looking at your post histories and all i see you all putting down everyone for their suggestions and saying things like "lol why would anyone say that" "lolz i cant believe u would do that," and its the same little group backing each others pessimism up throughout many threads. i hope you all get banned because this is just ridiculous.

You're such an angry person. It'll be ok, honest.

Seriously, quit making things up. Since you're keen on searching the forum's past, why don't you peruse the search feature to find out why BlackViper isn't all you make them out to be. Seems pointless for me to tell you because as with your previous thread, you tend to ignore advises anyways. Hell, you even ignore the fact that we make a lot of helpful tips by looking at our post history.

But whatever, right?

[Ranma_Sao]

I have personally had to debug crashes due to someone disabling the Telephony service. Took a long time to figure it out too. That's one of the many reasons I don't recommend to disable services, there are dependancies on almost every service. (Telephony RanmaSao search should find a multitude of posts on it.)

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

[bigdogchris]

I have a question.

I just reinstalled Vista x64. Before I had it up for 90 days and when I checked my services, there were maybe 10-15 running (no tweaking). This time, I disabled UAC and system restore like usual, but I have over 40 services running. I don't get it.

[Thor]

I have a question.

I just reinstalled Vista x64. Before I had it up for 90 days and when I checked my services, there were maybe 10-15 running (no tweaking). This time, I disabled UAC and system restore like usual, but I have over 40 services running. I don't get it.

there might be 40 services listed, but i doubt more than 4 or 5 are acctually running, services are the first thing to hit the swapfile as vista sees fit, unless they are activly being used. (this is why you shouldnt disable your swapfile.. even if you have say 16gb or ram, becuase then it will keep an active thread open in both the cpu and the ram, vs a paged thread in the ram. this is more in responce to a different thread i read on here, but i think it pretains here as well)

[dark_reign]

It doesn't hurt to turn off some services but you should remember what you turned off before attempting it because some things may quit working. If there's any good from it you do learn a bit about what services are running, their dependencies, etc. In some cases it can help you troubleshoot issues you may be having.

As for performance increases it's pretty subjective. It might be noticeable if you're running Vista with 1gb of RAM or less. With 2gb or more I highly doubt you will notice any performance gains.

[xxEIEIOxx]

Ok, lets look at it this way. I have 84 processes running right now. Processor usage is 0-2% and memory load is 37%. I could probably eliminate half of these running processes. It wouldn't save any noticeable processor time. Releasing more RAM when I already have 2GB free isn't going to do anything either. I am starting to wonder how many people on these forums complaining of Windows problems have "tweaked" their system and caused their own problems. I speak from experience with XP. I got suckered into this "tweaking" idea years ago. After hosing my system multiple times with the "large system cache" tweak before it was widely known this corrupted your hard drive, I did a lot of testing. I found that my system was actually about 1% faster leaving the services enabled. I have learned over the years that any tweak guides are complete crap, and if you want a faster machine, buy faster hardware. There is nothing you can enable or disable that is going to magically give you any kind of noticeable performance increase. I make these comments not to insult anyone, but to save you the wasted time of messing with it.

[DeaconFrost]

You're such an angry person. It'll be ok, honest.
I think you are right. Funny how, if we disagree, we are forum trolls with a superiority complex. If he disagrees with us, he's saving the readers of this forum from a great injustice. Long live hypocracy!
I am starting to wonder how many people on these forums complaining of Windows problems have "tweaked" their system and caused their own problems.
Absolutely. Back when I was tweak freak, I always had unstable systems, but it didn't bother me because I had all the free time in the world to fix them. Now that I have much more important things to spend my time on, I want my system stable, so I can go about using it. Ever since I started just "leaving it alone", I've had fast, stable systems, with XP and with Vista.

[legendz411]

UAC!I keed, I keed

And people still say turn UAC off. Tsk, tsk, tsk... shame on you all. You should be reprimanded and scolded and forced to turn over your Johnny Geek cereal box badges... shame on you, shame!!!



:D;)

[Mithent]

As for performance increases it's pretty subjective. It might be noticeable if you're running Vista with 1gb of RAM or less. With 2gb or more I highly doubt you will notice any performance gains.

That's the thing; if you're so low on RAM that the odd few hundred kilobytes you can scrape from here and there makes a difference, then it might help. It could, therefore, be more helpful back when computers had 8MB RAM and a few hundred kilobytes was a not insignificant amount. With a decent amount of RAM nowadays, you'll not notice the difference, and if you have insufficient RAM then your time is better spent buying some more rather than trying to disable things to get past it.

You're not going to recover anything noticeable in CPU cycles either, because if the service was busy, then in most cases it was doing something useful. Sometimes you might decide you don't want the functionality that, say, the search indexer offers and so gain a few cycles back by disabling it, but even then these services aren't constantly hammering the system in the way that some people seem to claim they are.

Basically, you could maybe get some benefits from disabling services in the past when RAM was at a premium, but now you get all the potential problems with none of the benefits.

[bigdogchris]

My point is, I've done nothing different, have much less installed on the system, yet have almost 3 times the amount of processes running as before. What's up?

*edit* OK I think I see what's up. There's a check box that says show processes for all users. Unchecking that takes away a lot of the processes that the system is uses, which are classified as $system type user probably.