Hi,
Actually, holycow, I don't think I'd recommend that you look for services to turn off. You'd be far better off learning the OS before you start to turn parts of it off.
I'm not dismissing your idea here, but hoping to point you toward a better, more cautious way of looking at this. After you've booted your system, start Task Manager. Look on the Processes list to see how much in the way of "resources" the various running services are taking. You'll note that the largest percentage of CPU time is being taken by the Idle process, unless you've got a hell-bent-for-leather program running concurrently. Look at the various service processes. When they're not actually doing something, they don't take any processing time. And they taked darned little memory.
Now look at the flip side. If you set an auto-starting service to manual (or worse yet, disable it) and your system needs it, your system will at the very least suffer some process failures. At the worst, the whole thing will collapse like a stack of wet cardboard.
The best reason for turning off the auto-starting behavior of some services would be for security-related issues. But, again, it's best to really learn something about the OS and its security features before you do this.
There are lots of people who will tell you that you don't need this service or that service. But they don't know what you need, because a) they're probably not as expert as they think they are, and b) they're not sitting at your computer. You have to know an individual system, its configuration, and the installed software, AND even the user's habits to know which services can be safely set to manual or disabled.
Balance the risk you take by turning of what might be a vital set of features for your system against the only actual savings you'll see performance-wise -- a few seconds of boot time. That's usually the only performance benefit you can realize by turning off an auto-starting service. This isn't like Win9X where every open process has staked out an unrecoverable portion of a limited resource stack. W2K doesn't ordinarily fully enable device drivers until they're actually needed by the system, it doesn't let idle services chew up CPU time or memory, and it doesn't have the piddly few K of resource stack that plagues Win9X users.
If you want to experiment a little to see what I'm talking about, you might go to
this site. If you decide to try some of that stuff, please be conservative in your approach. Try changing one item at a time and testing your system. My guess is that, if you make the changes they suggest, you'll see a small improvement in boot time and no noticeable effect in general performance. I guess the one exception would be with the indexing service. Depending on the hard drive / partitions, the complexity of the directory structures on the system, and your use patterns, turning that service off (setting it to manual) can offer an improvement in some application start times and in responsiveness of Explorer. However, should your normal use patterns make use of indexing, you'll be faced with a long wait for the service to start, and probably at a time when you don't want to be waiting for a service to start.
Have fun!
Regards,
Jim
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