Recommendations on what services to disable in XP?

[godfire]

Just curious. I do want my computer to mostly work the same, but I know there are a lot of unnecessary services sucking up my memory and cpu that I will probably never/very rarely use...suggestions?

 

[robisc]

This is probably the best resource I have ever used that tells what all these services do, check it out.
Vipers XP services site

 

[MedicBob]

Vipers site is a great site for seeing what services are running and why.

If you have any questions on a certain service, Google it and then ask here if needed. I am sure someone here has disabled every service just to see what happened.

 

[bacillus]

I am sure someone here has disabled every service just to see what happened.

hehe, some services are essential to get windows to run!

 

[godfire]

Thanks for the link. Very helpful.

 

[prosaic]

Originally posted by: godfire
Just curious. I do want my computer to mostly work the same, but I know there are a lot of unnecessary services sucking up my memory and cpu that I will probably never/very rarely use...suggestions?

If you look closely at the task manager's processes tab and add up the memory footprints and cpu use of these "unnecessary" services I imagine that you'll find that the memory and cpu time being "sucked up" is pretty damned small.

Seriously, there are some good reasons (security enhancement and / or customization of the system for a specific purpose) for setting some services to the manual setting, maybe even for disabling some services altogether. But performance enahncement usually doesn't occur from disabling services. If you see a considerable improvement in performance (real, not placebo effect) on a system from disabling services that run by default, then something on the system is misconfigured or operating incorrectly. In point of fact if you don't consider carefully what you're doing you may cause the failure of functions you and your system need when you disable services.

If you do this, please change one setting at a time and test the system to see how it behaves before proceeding to tinker with the next service. And it's usually better to set services you think you don't need to the manual setting rather than it is to disable them.

Good luck.

- prosaic