I trimmed my system down from 25 services to 8 and cut some of the crud out of my windows boot and every thing runs faster including my games. And Yes if it is running it is taking up CPU/Memory reasources. IF you dont believe me, just try enableing them all and add the rest from your windows cd that are not loaded by default. I promise you your system will come to a crawl.
http://www.blackviper.com/ is a great reasource for Windows services Knowledge.
Services are processes that run in the background and wait for system calls to act. NOt all of them will use CPU or memory recources. Most services will just load .dlls that wait in system memory and some don't use up any RAM and will remain on disk and be paged into memory if needed. This may sound bad, but these .dlls are only a few kilobytes in size. Also each process only uses the CPU when it is supposed to use it. Just because it says it is running in services.msc does not mean it is using up any CPU cycles or memory
So the fact of the matter is a service will not use any system recources unless the service is directly in use.
Also that blackviper site you posted is crap. It has alot of false information and bad advice. Also his idea behind disabling services is that it will iuncrease performance by not taking up as much system recources.
I myself do disable some services, but this is not for performance reasons . They are just annoyances such as Security Center.
Many sites also want you to believe that running some services are a security risk. This is complete BS. Someone would of have already hacked in to your PC to use a service as a means of attack.
Also the performance increase you saw was most likely the placebo effect. Another thing is that I have fixed a few PC's where the user was following blackvipers stupid advice by disabling services and then lost funcionality of something. This is because blackvipers site fails to mention quite a few things about many services.
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