Good or Bad: Starting WinXP in Selective Startup Mode

[Insomnium]

Sooo, I've been streamlining my WindowsXP installation on my laptop recently, and have been wondering as to what is the best way to disable some of the tasks and services that run in the background. I've disabled some in the past that I didn't need by right clicking on the taskbar icons, disabling, etc. , but what about those that run in the background that have no clear-cut way of disabling them? I've disabled a lot of stuff by running 'msconfig' and unchecking a few boxes in the 'services' menu, which causes XP to load in the so-called "selective startup" mode, but... should I continue to allow XP to do so or should I go into the registry and actually edit some startup files in order to allow XP to boot in 'normal' mode again? I guess making XP boot in 'selective startup' mode is a bit of a roundabout way of fixing the problem, but it works. Are there any reasons I should not use this solution?

 

[EeyoreX]

Are you trying to disable some services? Why not just disable them in the Control Panel. There is a "Services" applet under the Administrative Tools. You can set up whatever services you don't want to run, either make them manual, disabled or automatic.

\Dan

 

[Insomnium]

Yes and no. I have disabled some of the more annoying services (messenger), but the other apps that i needed disabled were things like "dadtray.exe", aka the Dell AccessDirect program and apps of that nature, which don't appear in the services tab. I think i'm going to stick to permanently booting in "selective startup" mode until something bad happens 🙂