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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."
Seems like an awful lot of work to kill some services. Personally I think starting in runlevel 3 is much easier, maybe Windows should think about going to a CLI-only interface for some of us uber-geeks out there. That'd gain them some respect in my book.
I wonder how this well XP will run on qemu with all of those services turned off? There is very little I need from windows and I wonder if this would help with those final annoying things I need from windows at home.
Anyone know what a similar exercise looks like for Mac OS-10.4? It is not, shall we say, exactly a speed demon and it would be nice to know what could be safely turned off when one is running CPU-intensive processes. Thanks.
"All successful systems accumulate parasites" -- Hal Hixon
Interesting...so you can kill almost everything.
I wonder if you can automate that.
And then, I wonder if you can provide the functionality that goes missing by running your own services. Sort of subverting Windows from the inside, and giving you more control over it.
But then, I'm not that interested. I've got my control. Total control. Without having to wrestle it from Windows.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
You clearly haven't been using a system recently that's been riddled with spyware,
So we're supposed to blame MS for Spyware? Windows doesn't ship with system-crashing spyware, and it's not even like viruses are its primary way in. Most spyware is willingly installed by clueless users.
My Windows machine at work is currently at 221 hours of uptime. I don't even remember why it was rebooted prior to that, but it wasn't because of a crash. The current version of Windows XP is pretty stable if you ask me - not as good of a 24/7 OS as most *nix's, though not for reasons of stability. Its interface is not designed for keeping large numbers of applications open at once, and it doesn't seem to handle memory all that well at this point (this used to be one of its strong suits compared to other OS's). But it doesn't crash unless you do something stupid (like install spyware) to make it crash.
Better yet, why run explorer.exe in the first place?
From memory (haven't done this for some time, so I could be a bit off...)
Start Regedit, find HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ Winlogon, Change the value of Shell from Explorer.exe to cmd.exe.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
On your typical Joe User system with broadband, your point is laughable at best. I have seen far too many typical Joe Users with system that are just "owned" by spyware/adware/malware/viruses. I live 1,300 miles from most of my family. Their systems are really, really bad. Every time I fly up to see everyone, I really an just doing "Windows admin" tasks for everyone. It is pretty sad that MS Windows allows a typical Joe User to totally destroy their system so easily, especially if those Joe Users use the "recommended"/"preferred" MS software of IE and outlook express.
Yes, technical users can lock down their home WinXP systems. My corporate WinXP dev workstation has not been rebooted for a long time and runs well (with the exception of explorer.exe crashing every time I log out!); This is at a fortune 500 that has spent 100's of thousands if not more on security (on a side note, we just spent a lot on an SSL VPN (in addition to our traditional VPN) solution so that any of our users that want to access our intranet from home need to go through that SSL VPN. Why did we buy this? Because we have 140,000+ employees and the _majority_ of those home users had viruses that were trying to get into our network and we had to protect our MS Win based servers (not our Linux or Solaris servers)! The majority of our non-technical home users had viruses running MS Windows!). My home WinXP system runs very well because I have protected it with a hardware firewall and a Linux firewall and locked down my wife's login account to just "Power User" so she cannot totally kill the system.
Now try to get the millions of Joe Users to implement these types of restrictions/securities/etc and see the backlash. They just won't/can't do it. The tasks are just too technical for most. The funny thing about all of this is that most Joe Users _do_ have some type of security. Many of them have Norton "firewall" or some other end-user type "protection". It is just funny how most of them _still_ are able have their systems destroyed in an average of 2-3 months or so.
Of my family members, so far I have gotten my brother-in-law to switch to Mac OS X (he is a photographer and wanted Mac anyway) and my sister to switch to Linux (web/email junkie only). I wrote down the root password for both of them, though they have no clue what to do with that root password. Both of their systems are still chugging along without issue. I can logged into each system every so often thanks to dyndns.org and I apply patches. I tried to do dyndns.org on some of my families WinXP boxes, however, they were getting infected faster then I could patch/clean them. It really is much easier for me to go North once a year with a bootable Linux CD and burn backups of their personal files and then do a restore, than to try to admin all their systems remotely.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
have been providing facts and utilities for years now, in the face of threats and obfuscation. Those with long memories will remember how they exposed the fact that NT Server and NT Workstation were the same binary product, but with different marketing and license terms, back in the mid-1990s.