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Running Windows With No Services
mattOzan writes "So how many of the almost 4 dozen default-enabled services does Windows XP really need in order to preserve basic functioning, like web surfing and running applications?
Zero, as it turns out.
Mark Russinovich at Sysinternals demonstrates that if certain steps are followed, Windows XP will still run with only two active processes: System and Csrss.exe. No Smss.exe, Winlogon.exe, Services.exe, Lsass.exe...
And, contrary to the expectations of various lead engineers at Microsoft, even Internet Explorer will still work under such conditions."
The bottom line is that this stripped-down Windows configuration is not practical, but makes a cool demonstration of just how little of Windows is required for basic functionality.
- There will be a delay before Explorer redraws the desktop
- won't be able to logoff
- Networking is also crippled
I don't think this stripped-down Windows provides even the most basic functionality expected by many users nowadays.It's like patients are treated as long as their hearts are beating, even though everything else has shut down.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Take a look at Black Viper's list of WinXP SP2 services.
Do you know who Mark Russinovich is? Besides writing key books on windows published by Microsoft themselves he is also a very important member of the windows developer community. There is no way in hell Microsoft would want to make him an unsatisfied customer. If they really didn't like what he is doing I bet that they would try to bribe him with large sums of money to stop instead.
Philosophy.
Apparently Microsoft Genuine Advantage is one of the services you can disable.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
Sysinternals is teh r0ks0rz!
No, seriously. If you don't know this, they have a utility called "Process Explorer" for Win32. It's like top on steroids. Actually, its vastly better than top, or any other process monitor I've ever seen. It will show you pretty much everything there is to know about a running Windows process; file handles, TCP connections, you name it. Its small, fast, mercifully lacking a "setup" and free.
They've got a bunch of other stuff for Windows I now consider essential. Check them out.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
No Start menu necessary! You just need to know the right options to rundll.
For instance, in Windows 98, it's:
C:\WINDOWS\RUNDLL32.EXE user,exitwindows
Google (along with a bit of experimentation) can help for other versions of Windows.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
The daemons are not what is slowing you down, unless they're polling.
Most of what the perceptual slowness is in Linux comes from a couple things.
* Inefficient GUI software. GNOME 2 software simply starts up and runs more slowly than GNOME 1 software.
* Heavyweight desktop managers and similar programs. I use sawfish, have a copy of gkrellm running, and use xbindkeys to launch all my programs Most of what I have open at any one time are Firefox windows, xterms (not the far slower gnome-terminals), and xemacs windows. These are all interactive programs, but things are much snappier when running these than when running the GNOME or KDE suites.
* Use accelerated drivers. There aren't that many that have RENDER acceleration, for example, and without that, all the antialised character blits to the screen are unaccelerated -- one reason why the antialiasing in GTK/GNOME 2 "felt" so slow. I use a Radeon 9250/128 bit data path and have no problems.
For all that, there's still a few things I'd like to point out.
* As a kernel, Linux *is* generally faster than Windows. You might be using slower userspace software, though.
* In The Olden Days, Linux distros tended to have an awful lot more daemons running out of box -- my Red Hat 5.2 box, IIRC, ran fingerd, ftp, ssh, telnet, and I think even a web server by default. There might be more -- talk might have been in there as well.
* Linux does a pretty good job of paging. If a daemon isn't doing anything, it isn't going to be consuming your resources.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
2k3 Server. Then again, I built it from scrach and installed the OS, so it had half a chance :).
(FreeBSD admin by choice, Windows admin by necessity)