Win XP services

[Monkey muppet]

A little backround:

I have recently been involved in setting up a home LAN, My client doesn't want to spend any money other than the hardware he has aquired already and Windows XP (which he has three licensed versions).

Now with one of these 'PC's', I wouldn't be suprised if a toaster has better SIS Sandra scores.

I've got XP on it with SP2, firefox, office 2000pro, zone alarm and Ad-aware 6. I've ran boot-viz, defragged, created a separate page file partition.

It is currently on a 100base connected to a Netgear DG814. It (the toaster PC) will be only used for surfing the net, Outlook mail fowarding and a little HTML file hosting.

I need to disable as many services as possible (I think I've tried everything else possible to speed this machine up a little bit......and no!!!! OC'ing is not an option) - any suggestions please.

..Harware tuneing is not my speciality.


For those peeps who want to know P233mhz, 128mb 100mhz Dimms, 4Gb HH, On-board: 1mb graphics & sound

 

[Dahak]

In all honestly, disabling some services probably will not help it too much, but a good place to look at what each service does is Black Viper. Aslo if you can try to bump up the ram to atleast 256mb.

The other thing that could be done is turn of the xp fancy look, by right clicking my computer -> advanced-> preformace settings -> visual effects tab -> Adjust for best preformace option.

Dahak

 

[Monkey muppet]

I've change the XP GUI by changing to 'classic' look (basically looking like w2k)

Upgrades are not an option either - the most I manged to squeeze into this box was 128mb (from 32mb).

Service likes 'Fast user switching' - is this nessecary for a box wich will never be logged into?
or 'DCHP client' - is this required if the router will be assigning IP addresses an DNS names?
or 'Messenger' should this ever be switched on?

 

[clamum]

This site has information about the services that may be running on your system. Open up the Processes tab after hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL and you can find out which services to shutdown from there. To stop them from starting up with Windows, go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Services and set them to manual or disabled.

EDIT: Here's a good guide to the Services.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Monkey muppet
Service likes 'Fast user switching' - is this nessecary for a box wich will never be logged into?

Probably not.

or 'DCHP client' - is this required if the router will be assigning IP addresses an DNS names?

Is DHCP client necessary if the system is a DHCP client? Yes, yes it is.

or 'Messenger' should this ever be switched on?

No reason to have it on, on most networks.

If you use the blackviper site, be careful. I remember either seeing mistakes or some really fishy information on there (it's been a while, and I don't care enough to reinvestigate it).

The "client" that isn't willing to spend any money isn't much of a client. Wait until that 4GB drive dies, and guess whose fault it will be. 😉

 

[Phoenix86]

I would avoid black viper, his descriptions are not detailed enough to make an educated decision about disabling the services. Also, I wouldn't recommend disabling them, set them to manual instead. This will mean the services is still available, just not started. If requested it will start and not cause an app/process to choke. Sometimes, the service won't start fast enough, and still produce errors, but it's better than disabled.

I would only disbale services for security issues, like maybe messegner. However, I would rather block that traffic at the firewall, before it every gets into the network as well as disabling the service.

I have seen lots of people disable too much, forget what they disabled, then have a PIA time with troubleshooting because they forgot about disabled services. It can also be a PIA to troubleshoot dependant service issues, since the errors may not refer to the dependant service.

A simple ex. would be, DHCP. Don't use it? OK, fine, you disable it and use static IPs. Then a year later, you move the machine to a friend's network, or buy a new router, and forget the service is disabled. Now you can't connect. Again this is a simple example, it can be much more difficult.